Moral Retards

An unwitting press and nervous university administration are bending over backwards to prove that CUNY sociology Prof. Timothy Shortell is right on the money.

What is being described as yet another academy-based "firestorm" erupted last week when Shortell posted disparaging comments about religion on his rinky-dink blog site, shortell.org.

The shocking and controversial things Shortell had to say included calling religious fundamentalists "moral retards" and saying, "Christians claim that theirs is faith based on love, but they'll just as soon kill you."

As a result, administrators at CUNY's Brooklyn College are launching an investigation into his views. Not his teaching methods (like Columbia's investigation into Joseph Massad), not any professional misconduct (like the University of Colorado's investigation into Ward Churchill), but his personal opinions.

Where to even begin with this? We won't touch the fact that CUNY is a secular institution in America's oldest bastion of free and rational thought-

On second thought, we will touch it. Like the t-shirt says, this is New York Fuckin' City. We don't worry about what anybody has to say about God, man, Church, the state or the relationship between them. For 400 years, Manhattan has been a haven for the pious and godless of all stripes. When moderate Puritans fled the theocratic settlements of New England, they came here. To its eternal credit, the thriving and diverse Dutch hamlet refused to enforce any strictures on the practice or non-practice of religion. The very basis for what would become the First Amendment was a document called the "Flushing Remonstrance," which defended the Queens Quakers against those who sought to limit their activities.

Witch-hunts centered on religion have never been the city's style. If public university professors can believe in the concept of Hell for non-believers, they should also be able to believe in the stunted intellectual development of those who think that a 2000-year-old storybook is the word of God. If you can't believe that in Brooklyn, then where?

While the "controversial" postings had been yanked from Shortell's site by the time we got there, the ones that remained reveal that the professor has been writing for quite some time about the dangerous influence fundamentalism has had on government in recent years-from assaults on abortion rights to the Schiavo case. In this he is hardly unique. If Shortell is to be persecuted for anything, it should be for being just another shrill and banal tenured egghead with a blog and too much time on his hands.

But there's another possibility. On his website, the professor lists his academic research interests as follows:

"American public discourse, ideology and social class, and social creativity and forms of knowledge production. I am currently working on a project examining public reaction to Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection from his day to our own."

The list was followed by a quote from Betrand Russell: "In a democracy it is necessary that people should learn to endure having their sentiments outraged."

All of which makes us wonder if Prof. Shortell isn't just conducting a little social experiment of his own. If that is in fact the case, his findings are, like the t-shirt says, pretty fuckin' scary.