Is it worth it to spend $49,385 a year to send your kid to Connecticut College?   The answer is no, judging from a wacky, hate-filled, and ignorant editorial by an official at Connecticut College.  In it, the College’s radical History Department chair, Catherine McNicol Stock, vilifies residents of the Pacific Northwest.

Enraged at rural people who identify with Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, Professor Stock claims that the Pacific Northwest, which regularly elects female and minority lawmakers, is “populated” by “angry white men,” racists and sexists, and “white-supremacist groups.”

The exact opposite is true.  The Pacific Northwest is very open to advances by minorities and women.  Washington State has elected an Asian-American governor (Gary Locke), and two female governors (including the trailblazer Dixy Lee Ray in 1976), and both of its current Senators are women.  Idaho has elected a Native-American attorney general, Larry Echohawk.  Alaska has elected a female Senator and a female governor (whose husband is part Eskimo).  These states also have elected minority judges, like Washington state appellate judge Jerome Farris, a moderate who was later appointed to the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.  Women comprise 4 of the 9 justices on the Washington Supreme Court, and once comprised a majority.

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The weeks leading up to a Presidential election have always been called the “silly season.” But the attacks from bloggers and the media on vice-presidential contender Sarah Palin’s supposed “gaffe” in her reaction to the takeover of the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac takes the political season to a new level of ridiculousness.

On Saturday, September 6, when the takeover and billion-dollar taxpayer bailout announcement that would happen the next day was already being reported by the press as imminent, Palin remarked on the campaign stump about the GSEs: “They’ve gotten too big and too expensive to taxpayers. The McCain-Palin administration will make them smaller and smarter and more effective for homeowners who need help.”

Fairly straightforward statement, as the nearly $6 trillion in mortgages on their books does make them very “big” and the impending bailout announced the next day will likely make them very “expensive.” But according to Sam Stein on the liberal Huffington Post, in a piece that has gotten more than 3,000 comments and was cited by the New York Times and HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher”, this was “her first potentially major gaffe during her time on the national scene.”

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The Religious Left seeks to impose its authoritarian social agenda through lawsuits and other means.  They love speech codes, despite the fact that they are often utterly uncivil.  The most sanctimonious and insufferable people I have ever met in my life were students and faculty at Harvard Divinity School, whom I had the misfortune of meeting during my studies at Harvard Law School.

One divinity professor at Harvard, a devotee of feminist theological studies, was fond of saying in and out of class that the proper role of men in religion should be to “shut up for a milennium,” to offset milennia of “patriarchal” religion.

The pompous left-wing clergy and theology professors who participate in the Newsweek/Washington Post forum “On Faith“ share a similarly intolerant ideological bent, although they insult not only men, but also women, claiming that conservative women like Alaska Governor Sarah Palin are guilty of “hypocrisy” simply for considering themselves to be “women,” when their politics are not liberal.  (Ironically, at Harvard, the most liberal female students didn’t claim to be “women,” but rather “womyn” or “wimyn,” erroneously viewing the word “women” as being of patriarchal origin).

Harvard Divinity School students made my classmates at Harvard Law School, themselves a fractious and often dogmatically left-wing lot, look like a model of open-mindedness and civility by comparison.  Apparently, things aren’t much better at the University of Chicago, home to wackos like Wendy Doniger.

I’ve often taken positions that are at odds with the Religious Right.  But compared to the Religious Left, the Religious Right is tolerant, easy-going, and sensible.