Bag of Worms Yet Words

Values (1) Introduction

I recall a conversation with a young mother some years ago. I did not know her well; we ran into each other when walking our young children to elementary school. We talked about how we were raising our children.  She said she was going to take her daughter out of public school and send her to private school. I was surprised. I was then committed to public schools. Why? I asked. Because I want, she answered without any hesitation, my child to have values.

I did not initially understand what she meant. I thought - in social scientist mode - that she had no alternative but to raise her daughter according to her values. Later, I thought I figured out what she meant. She wanted her daughter raised according to her Christian beliefs. That realization raised further questions in my mind. Did she think that she would have no values if she were a secular humanist?

I never had the opportunity to discuss my acquaintance's views on values. She soon enrolled her child in private school. Our routes to school were different. Years later, my sympathy for the concerns of that young woman has grown. I became more conservative. Moving closer to the world she occupied, I obtained a new understanding of her values and her philosophy of values. I think now that what she wanted for her daughter was an education in absolute, universalistic values about right and wrong and what is valuable and what is worthless. She wanted her child to grow up in a school that offered what her home offered; that is, a structured world of absolute values.

The young woman's concern about the values in our society was a response to the great shift in values that America and Western society in general have undergone in the past 150 years. In an earlier era, our values were (and we thought they were) absolute and universalistic. We assumed that, for instance, right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, and worthiness and worthlessness were objective features of the world that did not change over time, were shared by - or were at least true of and appropriate to - all societies, and were understandable by everyone.

What a revolution we have gone through! Today, throughout secular Western society, values are understood to be culturally relative. What is right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, valuable and worthless in one society will be different in another society. We think it is right and justified for the state to execute serial killers; other societies do not. We think (or at least we used to think) that physical mutilation of the body by scarring was ugly and unhealthful; in other societies, men and women adorn themselves with intricate scarrings and think themselves beautiful.

For us today, all decisions to do right or wrong are made in social situations. Right is right and wrong is wrong relative to the situation. We believe that different societies with contradictory values are both right and justified each in their values. We have made cultural relativity central to emancipatory liberalism, justifying in turn racial integration, sexual liberation, feminism, and homosexual life style.

The shift of official culture from universal, absolute values to cultural relativity is, I submit, the most important, fundamental shift Western society has undergone. The shift relegated value absolutism to the social niches of religious minorities. It trivialized the importance of values in social beliefs and social cohesion, in favor of raw utilitarianism. It undermined Western self-assurance. Western cultural self-confidence is so weak today that official elites are unable to voice a vigorous defense of the West against the vicious, totalitarian threat of radical Islam.

In this series of articles, I shall examine values - what they are, where they come from, how they work, how we might change them. I cannot promise that my presentation of this theme will be linear and predictable. While I am looking at some ideas I already know, I am mostly exploring. I start out with a conservative orientation of which I am aware, but I do not know what conclusions I will reach. My postings might not be regular, because I will be reading as I go along. "Values" are a large, involved topic, of interest to all social science disciplines, as well as religious culture and popular culture. (There is even a philosophical specialty that studies values in general, called axiology.) We will start, of course, by making definitions.

Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Definitions Not Used
• 3. Popular Definition
• 4. Social Science Definitions
• 5. Philosophical Definition: Existentialism
• 6. Cultural Relativism
• 7. The Fact-Value Distinction
• 8. Collapsing the Fact-Value Distinction

The Reign of Subjectivity (5)

The Feeling Child

By requiring the end of segregation on the basis of segregation's emotional impact on the segregated pupil, the Supreme Court mandated a new pedagogy based on a new child psychology for all schools and all children. This apparently unintended consequence sprang out of the theoretical source of the Social Science Statement's conclusions. This theoretical source was an extreme extension of progressive, child-centered pedagogy called "the mental-hygiene approach" to education.*

Two streams of understanding about child psychology came together in the mental-hygiene approach to education. One stream was the child psychologists' theory of "periods of emotional development" of children. The other stream was mental-hygienists' theory of "stages of socialized emotional maturation."#

According to the Midcentury White House Conference's summary of then current understanding of child psychology, every child grows from birth to adulthood through a sequence of stages (or periods). In each stage, one particular emotional development is central and is required for the eventual emergence of a healthy adult personality. These stages with their emotional development are**:

Birth to 12-15 months = trust
1 year to 3 years = autonomy
4 years to 5 years = initiative
6 years to 12 years = duty and accomplishment
adolescence = (personal) identity
late adolescence = intimacy
early adulthood = parenting sense
adulthood = integrity

Each developmental level involves the relationship of a child with other persons, that is, is social; or (to put it in my own words) is social enframing of emotional development. Mental-hygienists looked at the periods of emotional development in terms of the child who had difficulty fulfilling - or failed to fulfill - the particular emotional growth that was the central problem of a developmental level. Incomplete growth changed the kinds of purposive behavior the child was capable of expressing as she grew older. It also changed the dynamics between the child and the teacher. For the emotionally immature child at any stage of development, the teacher would become the focus of the central issue of that stage.

Consider the example of the child who is not permitted to say "no!" in the 1 to 3 year period.

"If he is not given opportunity to do this, he may fail to develop an adequate sense of himself as an operating force in his world and so continue throughout life to assert himself with a persistent and relatively incorrect negativism, or in some other ways equally inappropriate and unfortunate. Or he may remain always ineffective and unassertive, full of doubt."(Pp. 245-246.)

The child's teacher in the lower grades would have to deal with the child's emotional immaturity before the teacher could teach a subject matter. The child would not be capable of being an active agent of her own learning. Readiness to learn is not intellectual; readiness to learn is emotional.

The Midcentury Conference report clearly laid out the conclusion of this line of reasoning.

"[The mental-hygienist approach] emphasizes the predominance of feelings toward persons in the child's experience, and the extent to which these feelings pervade his response to all new situations, whether primarily social in nature of not. And it holds, furthermore, that the feeling life is prior and basic, playing such a fundamental role in experience that all other learnings are acquired in its terms."(P. 252.)

The child's (hence, the pupil's) emotional development precedes and conditions cognitive development. Academic curriculum must be made secondary to the school's fosterage of the child's emotional development.

"... Purposes, feelings, attitudes, ways of life, and  personal dedications are seen to be learned as well as subject matter, and ... subject matter is not and cannot be learned without at the same time learning attitudes and ways of life."(P. 258.)

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* Helen L. Witmer and Ruth Kotinksy, editors, Personality in the Making: The Fact-Finding Report of the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth, reprint edition ([1952, Harper & Brothers] Science and Behavior Books, Inc, Palo Alto, California, n.d.), p. 238 ff.

# The phrase, socialized emotional maturation, is mine. It is intended to point to the major elements of the mental hygienists' theory.

** Witmer and Kotinsky, Personality in the Making, pp. 5-26. The chronological boundaries are general or overlapping, because each child's development is individual.

The Reign of Subjectivity (4)

Misleading the Issue of Evidence

The Social Science Statement submitted to the Supreme Court in the Brown hearings in 1953, was an excerpted draft from a report, "The Effects of Prejudice and Discrimination," presented at the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth in 1950.*

The 1950 Draft and the 1953 Social Science Statement are different documents, of course, because the Statement is only (est.) 3800 words, while the Draft is (est.) 10,000 words. The Statement generally addresses "segregated groups," while making it clear it was focusing on the American Negro. The Draft addresses, in addition to Black Americans, Jews, Mexicans, and Italians as minorities who had received prejudice and discrimination. The Draft drew extensively on social science studies of Anti-Semitism. This subject was omitted from the Statement.

The main difference between the Statement and the Draft concerns the evidence for findings about the effect of segregation on African American children. Presented to other social scientists, and to a federal agency that employed social scientists, the Draft made it clear that there was little scientific evidence regarding the effect of prejudice, discrimination, and/or segregation on the personality formation of African American children.

"In spite of a wealth of material on the existence of prejudice and discrimination, on its origins, and on means of reducing these un-American attitudes, there is little in the scientific literature on the precise effects of prejudice and discrimination on health of personality."(Pp. 135-136.)

There was more research conducted on the effects of segregation on other ethnic and racial minorities, than on African Americans; so the author of the Draft intended to draw upon those studies. Making inferences was difficult, however, because children of different groups reacted differently to segregation; caution was warranted:

"In connection with what follows it must be remembered, however, the various minority groups that are affected by prejudice and discrimination differ greatly in their situation, and that the impact of adverse circumstances varies considerably from individual to individual. There are great differences between the situations of, say, Jews and Negroes, and within each group there are further differentiations."(Pp. 136.)

The admonition about evidence was repeated later in the Draft in a cautionary remark about research methods:

"Unfortunately for scientific accuracy and adequacy, thoroughly satisfactory methods of determining the effects of prejudice and discrimination on health of personality have not yet been devised, nor has a sufficient number of studies dealing with the various minority groups been made."(Pp. 140.)

Concern about inaccurate research methods was reinforced by quoting from scientific study by the social scientist, Otto Klineberg:

"'Conclusions obtained through the use of tests cannot be more valid than the test used.... Completely satisfactory research in this field will have to wait until psychologists have devised more adequate measure for the study of personality.'"(Pp.140.)

Such frank characterization of inadequacy in previous research studies and caution regarding available research methods is expected and appropriate in scientific study. Within the context of such prefatory explanation, the Draft then draws tentative conclusions, carefully qualifying inferences to restrict them to the available evidence.

The Statement** abandoned the tone of scientific caution. While disentangling the effects of segregation from other forms of discrimination was difficult, the Statement acknowledged, evidence permitted social scientists to present findings  confidently. Notice the shift in language in the Statement's characterization of the Midcentury White House Conference's findings.

"It [the Conference's report] highlighted the fact that ..."(P. 495).

"The report goes on to point out that ..."(P. 496.)

"The report indicates ..."(P. 496; this language is repeated several times, p. 496.)

"The evidence suggests ..."(P. 496.)

"Studies have show ..."(P. 496.)

"On the basis of this general fund of knowledge, it seems likely ..."(P. 497.)

"It may be noted that many of these social scientists supported their opinions on the effects of segregation ... by reference to one or another or several of the following four lines of published and unpublished evidence..."(P. 498.)

"The available scientific evidence indicates that much, perhaps all, ..."(P. 498.)

"The most direct evidence available on this problem comes from observations and systematic study of instances in which desegregation has occurred. Comprehensive reviews of such instances clearly establish the fact that ..."(P. 498.)

"The available evidence also suggests ..."(P. 499.)

Only at the end of the Statement do its authors acknowledge that the language of the Statement constitutes a shading and an interpretation of incomplete and inadequate research:

"The problem with which we have here attempted to deal is admittedly on the frontiers of scientific knowledge. Inevitably, there must be some differences of opinion among us concerning the conclusiveness of certain items of evidence, and concerning the particular choice of words and placement of emphasis in the preceding statement. We are nonetheless in agreement that this statement is substantially correct and justified by the evidence ..."(P. 499.)

Whether the social science research summarized in the Statement constituted a sufficiently strong rock for the Court to anchor its findings on inequality of segregated schools is not the point of this brief article. Rather, the point has to do with the consequences of the Brown decision.

The Brown decision did more than end segregated public education; it forced a new educational philosophy into the schools, profoundly reshaping the content of instruction and changing the role of schools in American society for all students, not just formerly segregated students. It was for those other consequences, a revolution in the ontology of American life, that the social science research was an inadequate anchor.

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* [Kenneth B.Clark], "The Effects of Prejudice and Discrimination," pp. 135-158, in Helen L. Witmer and Ruth Kotinksy, editors, Personality in the Making: The Fact-Finding Report of the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth, reprint edition ([1952, Harper & Brothers] Science and Behavior Books, Inc, Palo Alto, California, n.d.). The White House conference was apparently sponsored by the Children's Bureau, Federal Security Agency.

** Kenneth B. Clark, Isidor Chein, and Stuart W. Cook, "The Effects of Segregation and the Consequences of Desegregation; A Social Science Statement," reprinted in American Psychologist 59 (September 2004), 495-501.

The Reign of Subjectivity (3)

Inferiority and Humiliation

In the hearings before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, some of America's leading social scientists submitted an amicus curiae statement regarding "The Effects of Segregation and the Consequences of Desegregation."* This testimony, the evidence it cited, and other scientific testimony cited by the Court in its decision, were the basis for the argument that separate-but-equal education devastated the psyche of segregated minority children. The statement was signed by thirty-two scientists, most of whom were well-known professors.

The statement reports two key findings from social science and psychological studies presented at a 1950 conference.**

The first finding was that segregated minority children "often react with feelings of inferiority and a sense of personal humiliation" to their segregation. Here is how the statement put the matter:

"The report indicates that as minority children learn the inferior status to which they are assigned--as they observe the fact that they are almost always segregated and kept apart from others who are treated with more respect by the society as a whole--they often react with feelings of inferiority and a sense of personal humiliation. Many of them become confused about their own personal worth." (Pp. 495-496.)

The second finding was that the psychological effects of segregation on children last beyond their school years and often produce destructive behavior. Here is the relevant language.

"... the evidence suggests that all of these children are unnecessarily encumbered in some ways by segregation and its concomitants." (Pp. 496.)

The statement acknowledged the difficulty of isolating, observing, and measuring the psychological effects of segregated education, as distinguished from the effects of general prejudice against minority children and as distinguished from social disorganization in the minority community. The scientists believed they had nonetheless found in empirical research that segregation was especially powerful in its adverse effects on children. The power of segregated education derived in part from the "symbols of authority, the full force of the authority of the state" involved in enforcing segregation. (Pp. 497.)

It was important to note that the inferiority and humiliation produced by segregation often produced, in the children, "a generally defeatist attitude and a lowering of personal ambitions. This, for example, is reflected in a lowering of pupil morale and a depression of the eduational aspiration level among minority group childen in segregated schools. In producing such effects, segregated schools impair the ability of the child to profit from the educational opportunities provided him." (Pp. 496.)

The implication of the scientists' findings was that the highest priority need was to raise the minority children's self-worth (through integrating schools) first, so the children could then learn more effectively. Enhancing self-worth through family reconstitution or reducing minority social disorganization would not be effective without de-segregation, because the positive effects of family and social betterment would out-weighed by the deleterious effects of segregation enforced by the state.

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* Kenneth B. Clark, Isidor Chein, and Stuart W. Cook, "The Effects of Segregation and the Consequences of Desegregation; A Social Science Statement," reprinted in American Psychologist 59 (September 2004), 495-501.

** Kenneth B. Clark, "Effect of Prejudice and Discrimination on Personality Development," Fact Finding Report Mid-century White House Conference on Children and Youth, Children's Bureau, Federal Security Agency 1950 (mimeographed at the time, but subsequently published in book form).

The Reign of Subjectivity (2)

Feelings of Inferiority

The Brown decision [ BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) ], decided on May 17, 1954, and delivered by Chief Justice Warren in June, declared that state-funded public educational segregation of white and Negro students, even when the physical facilities of the segregated students are equal, violates the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution and is therefore unconstitutional. The ruling ended "separate but equal" educational policy based on the 1896 Supreme Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson [PLESSY v. FERGUSON, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)].

The Court found that substantive equality of physical facilities did not provide equality before the law as required by the Fourteenth amendment. The issue of equality had to be judged in terms of an extended understanding of how learning occurs in education and the role of education in American life. Drawing upon scattered lower court findings [esp. Briggs v Elliott (see Dissenting Opinion of Judge Waites Waring ...), the Supreme Court concluded that inequality arises in the effect of segregated education on the quality of learning the student achieves and the opportunities opened to students by their schooling.

For segregated Black students, the mere fact of segregation means they are, in the view of white citizens and students, inferior to white students. Black students come to feel inferior. Their sense of inferiority lowers their motivation to learn, leaving them with an incomplete education. When they leave school, their incomplete education reduces their opportunities for success in American life. Their assumption of inferiority leads to the fact of inferiority, hence inequality.

Justice Warren quoted the key logic from a lower court decision:

"Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law; for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system."

A close look at this logic would reveal assumptions.

The Court assumed that separation would induce a feeling of inferiority; rather than separation providing the segregated students with the opportunity for self-defined fields to earn feelings of merit.

It also assumed that a feeling of inferiority would cripple motivation to compete and to succeed; rather than motivating a desire to compete and overcome odds.

We should point out here, as a theme to which we will return later, what the Court effectively did. The Court made the subjective feelings of the students the test of inequality. Those feelings would have objective products and indicators, such as diminished achievement in adult life, but the Court did not provide any reason to believe that lack of objective indicators of subjective feelings of inferiority would negate the existence of such feelings as the test of inequality.

The Supreme Court was aware that their assumptions might be challenged. They asserted, therefore, that their assumptions were proved to be fact by contemporary social science research. Oral and written testimony from social scientists had been presented to the Court when the case was argued before it. In the opinion, the Court made the following footnote reference (#10):

K. B. Clark, Effect of Prejudice and Discrimination on Personality Development (Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth, 1950); Witmer and Kotinsky, Personality in the Making (1952), c. VI; Deutscher and Chein, The Psychological Effects of Enforced Segregation: A Survey of Social Science Opinion, 26 J. Psychol. 259 (1948); Chein, What are the Psychological Effects of [347 U.S. 483, 495] Segregation Under Conditions of Equal Facilities?, 3 Int. J. Opinion and Attitude Res. 229 (1949); Brameld, Educational Costs, in Discrimination and National Welfare (MacIver, ed., (1949), 44-48; Frazier, The Negro in the United States (1949), 674-681. And see generally Myrdal, An American Dilemma (1944).

In our next article, we will start examining this cited social science literature and its authors.

The Reign of Subjectivity (1)

The Landmark

For nearly a generation, American society has been in the thrall of self. The subjective self has been the single most important ontological reality in the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans. We have even characterized two entire generations - boomers and generation X - in terms of self-obsession. Social policy, educational policy, law, and popular culture have been reshaped in obedience to the perspectives and needs of each self-centered person. The U.S. Census asks persons to identify themselves in terms of their self-identified ethnic or racial identity. Educational doctrine is reshaped to build self-esteem in pupils as a distinct objective, separate and prior to academic learning. Sexual harassment policy roots grievances in a person's subjective perception of discomfort and hostility, without the need for injury or objective standards. We don't need to say anything about popular culture. Popular culture indulges and promotes a narcissism that sucks the life out of any universal social values.

How did America arrive at such a state? One explanation might focus on boomers and generation X living in a time of relative international stability and peace. No one has asked these generations for self-sacrifice or contribution to any cause greater than their self-indulging satisfaction. Ending the universal male military draft symbolizes the license of release from civil responsibility. While this hypothesis might explain the personal pursuit of self by these generations, it does not explain the profound reorientation of social policy, education, and law.

Another explanation looks to the second-wave feminism, the entry of married women into the wage labor force, and the decline of mothers who stay at home, raise children, and keep house. The phenomenon of married women in the labor force explains a great deal about recent American social life, for instance, the decline of community voluntarism; but it is difficult to see how it should necessarily lead to self-obsession. Why shouldn't it have led to self-sacrifice? In fact, it could be said it has contributed to service for others, as many married women in the labor force are now caring for their parents in their own home or their parents' home, expending their hard-earned money and time for this noble purpose.

Other social commentators have pointed to the extraordinary wealth and consumerism of America since the 1950s. Consumption has become personalized. Buyers consult only their own tastes and needs when deciding to buy clothes, automobiles, personal computers, homes, vacations, and the myriad of other goods and services we demand. Manufacturers produce for the personal self. Retailers create markets that glorify consumption and instant gratification. The constant flow of radio, television, movies, public conversation, and advertising, that fills our minds, speaks to consumption and serving self, not serving others. Consumption is an important economic and social force, but, nonetheless, I am not convinced of its profundity. People modify their consumption easily, by marrying, for instance, in ways that require them to modify their self-satisfaction to take into consideration the wants of others.

What about the secularization of American society? Do not the opposition to the display of religion in public affairs, the decline of the historic mainline American Protestant churches, and the eradication of religious reference in public education speak to the loosening of absolute standards? We can easily dismiss this explanation; for the United States has been in the midst of a multi-generational religious revival. Compared to the 1920s, which were a benchmark in the decline of American churches, America is today a religious society. Christianity is an extraordinarily powerful and growing social force, spreading its messages of personal humility, religious redemption, and spiritual confidence to a larger American public every day.

Much public discussion has been made in conservative circles of the existential and post-modern philosophers whose philosophical ideas have focused on the denial of universality in human nature, cultural relativity, and the construction of personhood and gender. They have argued that the socially constructed-self is the primary reality of each person's life. Many of their ideas have been adopted by radical feminists, influencing feminist social and education ideologies. Still, not denying the influence of post-modern philosophy in academic circles, it difficult to see how these ideas directly changed the world view of ordinary Americans. Most Americans don't discuss Sartre, or Foucault, or Derrida at breakfast and implement their programs after lunch.

I will argue there was a much more important basis for this shift in American social character - more profound and more influential, because it is the law. This basis is the Supreme Court's landmark decision declaring separate-but-equal social policy as unconstitutional: Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, 1954. In the next several articles, I shall examine the Brown v Board of Education decision and the reasoning behind it.

University Lights (6)

Turning Out the Lights
The Witches' Brew: Affirmative Action and Sexual Harassment Policy

Fair is foul, and the foul is fair. Hover through the fog and filthy air.

To the noxious brew of University life, bubbling with desperation and viciousness, the collectivists have added a highly lethal poison - affirmative action and sexual harassment policy. These governmental policies thrust the class system of justice (see my article here) deep into institutions arranged around individual merit and competition. As we have seen, the meritocracy of academe is compromised by a class system, in which the faculty is divided between the stars - competitive individuals who comprise a minority at most schools - and the craftsmen and craftswomen, noncompetitive faculty members who are collectively organized into defensive voting alliances. Affirmative action reinforces the class system, legalizes it, and gives the craftsmen great political power. Their political power is increased by sexual harassment policy. Sexual harassment policy gives craftswomen professors and their allies among the minority and GLAAS* faculty, a deadly weapon to repress opposing opinion and pull down the meritocracy.

I believe most stars supported academic affirmative action in the 1970s and 1980s, aside from ideological reasons, because they believed it would increase the pool of candidates from which to obtain faculty members with outstanding potential for excellence; i.e., affirmative action would reinforce the star system. No doubt this happened here and there; but overall, the politics of voting alliances defeated the star system and came to control affirmative action. Affirmative action recruitment came to be a means to build membership in voting alliances. Second rate or third rate candidates would be selected by department majorities, precisely because they would not be stars and would join the voting alliance that brought them employment. Affirmative action thereby reinforces cronyism and political preferment in administration at all levels. It encourages a mythology of false identity and victimage, because these distortions are rewarded by non-merit based preferment.

Subversion of the intent of affirmative action has been sad, but not tragic. The capture of sexual harassment policy by voting alliances and their affirmative action allies, on the other hand, has been tragically pernicious. Sexual harrassment policy motivates false accusation. No doubt, there are genuine case of sexual harrassment; but the reward, in terms of acquiring power that trumps due process procedures that might be in place, is so great that it motivates ruthless lying. Sexual harrassment policy has ushered in an era of suppression of all opinion that defies the mediocrity of the craftsmen class. Political correctness has been built on the basis of sexual harassment policy, expanding suppression of opinion to putative racial harassment, hate speech, and social and political conservatism. This ominous development has been chronicled by Alan Kors and Harvey Silverglate in The Shadow University (Free Press, 1998). It does not need to be repeated here.

Gaining control of sexual harassment policy at universities and colleges, the craftsmen voting alliances have obtained control over administrations. There is no other explanation for the wholesale collapse of administrative protection of speech and competitive excellence at some universities around the country. Sexual harassment policies are institutionalized into permanent offices with paid administrators and advisors. The policies are written and rewritten to weaken due process for accused individuals and to expand discretionary power in application of the policy. Sexual harassment policy has become in universities primarily political.

Control of affirmative action policy and sexual harassment policy creates a legal bastion for political correctness as a weapon in vicious university politics. This corruption of corporate governance and suppression of political opposition by organized political groups with a collectivist ideology has a traditional name that should be applied here: fascism.

* GLAAS: Gay, Lesbian, and Alternative Sexuality

Revised January 16, 2005.