Back on 13 June 2017, my colleague and friend Ralph Hancock, political philosopher that he is, offered a thoughtful piece about feminism in the pages of the Deseret News:
I’m very sympathetic to what he wrote — no, let me just come right out and say that I agree with him — and I regard it as raising good points for discussion even with those who might fundamentally disagree.
That’s what we do in academia and in a free society generally. We express opinions and discuss them.
Some folks, though, apparently think that Professor Hancock shouldn’t be allowed to get away with such things.
In a piece quite misleadingly and somewhat ungrammatically entitled “BYU professor: Women can’t be a mother and have a career” — Dr. Hancock never actually said any such thing — “The Progressive Mormons” not only take my colleague to task but, pretty plainly, seek to silence him.
Here’s the passage that, they declare, “directly stated women can’t be a mother and have a career”:
“But today’s easygoing feminist assures us that women can have it all, that there is no need to choose between a more traditional, family-centered role and a more emancipated, self-fulfillment model. Ah, if wishes were horses! In fact, the wish to have it all, the best of motherhood and the best of ‘liberation’ on an equal footing with liberated men, is precisely the feminist-lite delusion that both radical feminists and conservative non-feminists contest.”
A direct statement that women can’t be mothers and have careers?
Hardly. It says no such thing, neither directly nor indirectly.
Rather, it points to the obvious fact that balancing motherhood and career is difficult, and that being a full-time mother in anything like the traditional sense while, at the same time, successfully competing as a corporate executive, trial lawyer, physician, or theoretical physicist against those not bearing the burden of traditional motherhood is effectively impossible. It’s just not feasible, for most women, to “have it all.” Something has to give.
This is simple realism.
And it’s not uniquely a woman’s problem. Any man who’s served as a bishop, or who’s devoted weeknights and weekends to Church youth assignments, or who tries to be a devoted father faces professional challenges unknown to those who devote all their waking hours to climbing the corporate ladder at the expense of marital and family commitments and community service. Time spent home teaching, coaching a girls’ soccer team, working at the welfare farm, attending ballet recitals, serving in the temple, and helping with youth camps is time that’s unavailable for single-minded career advancement.
I find the “Progressive Mormons'” comment that Professor Hancock’s article was “disparaging towards women” more than a bit strange. Perhaps they read a different version of it than I did. Curious, too, is their remark that the column “was all over the place, forcing the reader to read it several times over just to follow the wild bounces.” Or, perhaps, not so much curious as revealing. I had no such problem, and I noticed no “wild bounces.”
Candidly, I think that they were too eager to be indignant at Professor Hancock to put much effort into understanding what Dr. Hancock actually wrote.
Thus far, I might simply scratch my head, bemused by the seeming inability or unwillingness on the part of some ideologues to understand what their opponents say.
But then the “Progressive Mormons” take a sinister turn.
“It’s a shame female students at BYU will be taking classes,” they say, “from a professor who made these comments.”
In other words, Professor Hancock is victimizing young women, our sisters in the Gospel. It’s not enough to disagree with him. He must be demonized.
It’s unsurprising, given that implicit view, that these “Progressive Mormons” seek to stop Ralph Hancock’s evil actions and to put an end to his doubleplusungood crimethink.
So they close with an exhortation to their readers to contact a high ranking BYU administrator and assistant to President Kevin Worthen, as well as BYU’s Title IX administrator and Professor Hancock’s academic department. They helpfully provide names, email addresses, and telephone numbers for each of these.
This is a pretty shameless attempt to intimidate Professor Hancock (and anybody else who dares to deviate from Progressive orthodoxy), to constrain the public expression of opinions of which “Progressive Mormons” disapprove (and which these two “progressives” don’t seem altogether to understand), and, as the saying goes, to have a “chilling effect” on free speech.
Strikingly, Professor Hancock’s article is entirely consistent with the teachings, on this complex of topics, of the prophets and apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints over the past very nearly two hundred years.
Well, I’m going to be helpful, too:
The first two contacts supplied by the “Progressive Mormons” will work for me, as well. However, I’m not in Political Science but, rather, in the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages. So that’s [email protected], or 801-422-3396.
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