Threats of Murder Go Unpunished at Providence College

Anthony Esolen

This article is a continuation of the previous, written on behalf of Michael Smalanskas, the brave student at Providence College who posted a sign affirming reality: because the Catholic teaching that only a man and a woman can feasibly marry is but a plain recognition of what is biologically, physically, and anthropologically the case. We do not need special revelation to tell us that the sun rises in the east, that two and two are four, and that the congress of the sexes requires the sexes. But we live in a time of political madness.

So after Michael was threatened with rape, and had for several nights to walk a gauntlet just to go to the bathroom and brush his teeth, and after the president, Father Brian Shanley, refused to meet with him or his father, and he became a marked man on campus, what could possibly be worse?

A murder threat is worse.

Let us recall that, in the fall of 2016, the entire campus was in an uproar over allegations that racist epithets were cast at some women who were trying to enter a private residence where a party was going on, that it was a whites-only party, and that bottles were thrown at them. Eight students forthwith occupied Father Shanley’s office for thirteen hours, presenting him with a list of demands (called, in fact, “The Demands”) regarding courses, student life, hiring, and tenure. But as it turned out, it was not a whites-only party, there were no racist epithets, the leader of the girls was drunk, and the only bottle thrown was a plastic water bottle, half empty, nor could anybody determine who threw it from the balcony or whether it was tossed with any intent. The investigation ruined the whole next semester for the accused. When the associate vice president for student affairs, Kristine Goodwin, who conducted the trial, was asked whether the boys could be forgiven the offense of having a party, she refused. The girls who had disturbed the peace, who in the most charitable interpretation of events had been mistaken or had exaggerated, and who had wanted to take part in that same offense, were not reprimanded.

The professors who leapt to judgment against the boys never apologized. Goodwin did not apologize.

Now to the present, Thursday, May 17,2018.

Michael and his fiancee are at Foxwoods Casino for the senior dance. The event is not cheap. He is seated at table with people he does not know, but who know him, because, after what the college allowed and subtly encouraged, everybody knows him. A young man at the table, Alec Manfre, demands that Michael and his fiancee leave. Others at the table say they want him gone too. Michael, who has paid for his and his fiancee’s dinners, declines the invitation. Manfre begins to grow obnoxious, and invites Michael to step into another room, where they have words, and he calls Michael things I will not repeat. Michael says he is just there to enjoy himself, and the whole controversy need not come up.

Meanwhile, a young man named Harry Verenis approaches them and says, “What’s your address? I want your address, because I want to come get you. I want to come stab you, because that’s what you deserve. You deserve to be stabbed for being so ignorant.” The language was more colorful than that, of course. Manfre then joined in, and Michael finally had to tell them to do something right there and get it over with, after which they backed off.

Michael Smalanskas was threatened with murder—for being normal, and for not wanting to hide under a bushel or a mountain the Church’s understanding that the sun rises in the east, two and two make four, and it takes a man and a woman to make a marriage.

He went immediately to one of the Dominicans in attendance, then to the Connecticut police, and the security at Providence College.

The next morning he sent a message to Goodwin, Father Shanley, Father Sicard (the executive vice-president), and Steve Sears (Dean of Students), informing them of what had happened at the casino. “I told them,” he writes, “they were each personally responsible for this occurring, given that they [had] created an environment where this [was] tolerated and encouraged.” A hostile environment in the proper sense of the word: violent assault. Michael demanded, reasonably, that Manfre and Verenis be forbidden to march at graduation, “seeing as others have been given this sentence for much less.”

Did the campus move into action? It is to laugh. Says Michael, “I received a cold, careless e-mail back from Kristine Goodwin on behalf of the group, saying they had been made aware of the situation. A no-contact order was placed on [Verenis]. She said [the complaint] would go to Community Standards from there, and to let her know if she could be of any assistance.”

Would that be assistance before or after the student made good on his threat?

That evening, Friday, May 18, Michael received an e-mail from Sears and from Public Safety, essentially saying that everything was fine. The complaint would be processed after graduation on May 20. The message was written by the college’s legal counsel. In Michael’s opinion, the campus security were taking the threat seriously, “but the college wanted nothing to do with it.”

We come to Saturday morning, May 19, some 36 hours or more after the threat. It’s the awards ceremony, and Michael is to receive the prize for top student in theology, and another for excellence in philosophy. After the ceremony he is standing outside and Goodwin passes by. He calls her name, but she ignores him. Then he says, “You should be ashamed of yourself. I was threatened with murder and you did nothing about it. You can live with that for the rest of your life.”

That is all. He said this in public. Witnesses can vouch for it.

Later, he is informed that unless he apologizes to Goodwin for “threatening” her, he will not be allowed to march at graduation. So he has to leave the celebration to go to the safety office, where he declines the honor of apologizing for something he did not do. At 10 PM he is informed that he will be permitted to walk, but only because Goodwin had acquired a bodyguard for the day, to sit with her on the stage. There would also be plain-clothes policemen all around, ready to haul him out of there if he so much as flinched. No guards, apparently, on the lookout for Manfre and Verenis.

This restraining order continues in force, and that Michael will be barred from the college for making Goodwin feel “threatened.” It is a classic case of bad conscience and projection. I must pause to untangle the contradictions. Goodwin was pleased to monitor (and encourage) a large and unprecedented protest against a single faculty member (me), and it never occurred to her then that protesters can grow violent even after a protest is over, or that somebody might feel threatened by being so targeted. I didn’t—but my wife did, very much so, on my behalf. Goodwin never wrote to Michael to offer him support when he was threatened with rape. She never moved to discipline the students who congregated in his hall after hours. She did not forbid the assaulter to march at graduation. Of course not. When you give your heart and soul to politics, you lose your sense of decency, proportion, plain dealing, and human kindness. It does not matter what the politics is.

Michael did nothing wrong. His championing of the truth of marriage is only what Father Shanley and Father Sicard themselves should be doing, frankly and simply. That should not be left to a lone student, and when he does their job, he should not be treated as a criminal.

Let’s go over this again. A student is made the object of universal loathing, at a supposedly Catholic college, for a poster that did nothing but affirm that the sun rises in the east, two and two are four, and it takes a man and a woman to make a marriage. These are my words: his poster was entirely affirmative, condemned nobody, and employed not one satirical word or glance. He is harassed in his dormitory and threatened with rape. The president will not meet with him or his father. Then at the senior dance he is harassed and threatened with murder. The college does a big nothing. When, forty hours later, he accuses the dean of student affairs of being indifferent to the threat, she accuses him instead and threatens to bar him from graduation, the same graduation where all of the offending students, including Manfre and Verenis, would be marching without consequence.

There is only one explanation for all of this. The people in charge of Providence College do not actually believe that it takes a man and a woman to make a marriage. So anybody who upholds the truth publicly ought to pay. That is why I am told they are backing, to be the new Dean of Diversity and Inclusion, a woman who boasts that she left her husband, whom she says she loved, to carry on sexual affairs with other women. She is now “married” as a lesbian. Meanwhile marriage is sinking like a ball of lead in the deep blue sea, and they do not care. They are on the right side of history, they suppose. I cannot find that right side in Scripture.

It is as if the whole misery-making Sexual Revolution had passed overhead like a little white cloud, leaving behind nothing but good cheer and solid families and children born within the strong haven of marriage, and the culture roundabout were full of wholesomeness, and—and to hell with it. It was the most calamitous mistake of my lifetime, and I and everyone who grew up in its midst have been harmed by it. To hell with it. And as for Catholic schools that capitulate to it—let God judge. He is just, and is not to be fooled by our slogans.

(Photo credit: Michael Smalanskas)

https://www.crisismagazine.com/2018/threats-murder-go-unpunished-providence-college

Virtue Signaling and Secular Redemption

Jason Morgan

Ever since former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began kneeling before preseason games in 2016, taking a knee in protest has become all the rage among the self-styled athletic elite. Spreading out from Kaepernick’s banal act of “defiance,” more and more players on more and more teams began refusing to stand for the playing of the national anthem. The madness has now reached such a pitch that team coaches—the Steelers’ Mike Tomlin, for example—and even team owners—such as the Cowboys’ Jerry Jones—are showing ingratitude toward the very nation that has enriched them. Players from awful inner city neighborhoods are protesting the police presence which keeps those places from descending into full chaos—and are also destroying the league that was their one ticket out of poverty.

In all of this, they are cheered on by their echo chambers in academia and the media, the semi-literate millionaire gladiators who staff the phalanxes of Sunday bloodsport, along with their keepers, have suddenly entered the pantheon of secular saints, heroes of political correctness who have found a way to regurgitate the cant of the liberal guardians without uttering a single word. As anyone could have predicted, ESPN—the sports-themed social justice clearinghouse whose anchoress Jemele Hill recently called Donald Trump a “white supremacist,”—has been supportive of the kneelers. The returning Apollo 11 astronauts were met with less fanfare than the linemen and tight ends genuflecting while our nation’s song is played.

But kneeling and pigskins were not always looked upon with such favor by the arbiters in the institutional politburo. Just last month, for example, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that former high school football coach Joseph Kennedy, whose pregame practice included kneeling at midfield in silent prayer and who was fired when he refused to stop praying, had no First Amendment grounds to sue for reinstatement. As reported in the Washington Examiner, the court found that Coach Kennedy “took advantage of his position to press his particular views upon the impressionable and captive minds before him.”

And then there was Tim Tebow. As an undergraduate quarterback at the University of Florida and then a player in the NFL, Tebow used to kneel in prayerful thanksgiving for touchdowns. He was roundly mocked by the media for this, subjected to intense ridicule for daring to express his faith in the public square. Tebow’s good nature allowed the scorn to roll off his back, but for many his treatment by the gods of broadcasting was a wake-up call. The term “post-Christian America” became a virtual slogan for our first post-Christian president, but even before it caught on the PC pillorying of Tim Tebow alerted us to the hard shifting of the cultural winds. Really and truly, the Christian hawsers anchoring the ship of the United States were being heaved back into the deep at lightning speed.

Long before Tim Tebow was born, of course, the takeover of America’s institutions by cultural Marxists and dyed-in-the-wool atheistic communists was well underway. By now, no one should be surprised to hear that most mainline churches are in full, fawning thrall to homosexual “marriage,” for instance. Recently, to take just one example, Fr. James Martin, a Jesuit who has made a career out of bending his own knee to the idols of the age, published a book which surely charts a course toward the homosexualization of even the Catholic Church. But it isn’t just churches. Academia, print media, broadcast media, the armed forces, the courts, the intelligence services, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, the medical profession, the public schools, charities, large corporations, and every last labor union in the country—all have been swamped by politics. And politics, for the cultural Marxists, is a way of freezing natural human interaction and paralyzing resistance to infiltration. The strategy has worked everywhere it has been tried.

Except, until now, in sports. While some athletes have been outspoken about their political views, the tradition until just yesterday was for players to keep their politics part of their private lives. We knew Michael Jordan was friends with Bill Clinton and we knew Mike Tyson was a supporter of Donald Trump. We knew Tom Brady leaned right and Ray Lewis leaned left. But we didn’t care. Politics and sports were anathema, we thought. We had given up on religion and on shared moral tenets, but Sundays (there is no small irony in this) were days when we could put our differences aside and come together as one.

This began to change several years ago with the advent of virtue signaling. Virtue signaling is the practice, now endemic in the United States, of letting everyone know that you embrace the right views, hold the right opinions, and vote for the right candidates. (And by “right” here, I of course mean “left.”) Akin to Thorstein Veblen’s conspicuous consumption, virtue signaling is a typically American way of showing off one’s newfangled achievements to one’s equally clueless neighbors. Virtue signaling requires no thought and no investment of either time or reputation. All that is necessary is to parrot what one hears on TV. It is as simple as that.

One may have supposed that football, of all activities, would have been safe from the encroachments of virtue signaling, however. Once held up by Progressive champion Teddy Roosevelt as the perfect training for young men to fight imperialist wars, football has always been violent barbarism. Beyond considerable athletic prowess and the ability to strategize and remember plays, it requires no formal education of its practitioners. It is, in fact, horribly detrimental to the cognitive abilities of those who play it. But it is precisely for this reason that football, once the apolitical axis of shared American cultural life, lay open to political takeover after all.

It is no coincidence that the advent of virtue signaling in football was simultaneous with the revelations—leaks at first, but now a horrifying torrent—that repeated concussive hits were causing devastating, debilitating brain damage in football players at all levels. The NFL, which has some of the most powerful and highest-paid lawyers on the planet, denied it all at first. But then one after another player came forward with the same story. Some players committed suicide. Others—or their widows—filed suit. The NFL began to look monstrous even in the eyes of the proletariat, which formed its most loyal revenue base. The NFL had a public relations problem. What to do?

The answer was as brilliant as it was shrewd. The NFL, virtually overnight, transformed itself from a league of pile-driving body blows and periodic maimings (all of which were played back in slow motion as the ratings numbers climbed) to a troupe of pink-clad activists who just happened to play a ball game but whose real purpose was “raising awareness” about “women’s issues.” And it was not to be chalked up in the debit column, either, that the new “woman friendly” NFL served to distract attention from Adam “Pacman” Jones, Adrian Peterson, Brandon Marshall, Johnny Manziel, Daryl Washington, and the dozens of other NFL players who have been either accused or convicted of violence or sexual assault against females. Ben Roethlisberger, the Steelers quarterback who so boldly sat out the anthem before last Sunday’s game, has twice been accused of sexual assault. He is now, naturally, a secular hero for showing contempt for the country whose criminal justice system allowed him twice to walk free.

The NFL’s new virtue signaling strategy worked like a charm. Female viewership soared, the league was able to appear humanitarian (despite the fact that its employees were being beaten to senseless pulps each weekend), and, for once, the players were able to give the world a peek into their political views. Was anyone surprised that an organization devoted to wanton violence for money would team up with the Susan G. Komen outfit, which funds precisely the same activity with its support for Planned Parenthood? But it doesn’t matter, because Planned Parenthood uses Susan G. Komen for cover, too. Everyone likes to signal their own virtue. Football players and coaches are hardly the exception.

It was only natural that, eventually, someone should take the virtue signaling to the next level and inject real, unmistakable politics into the game. Enter Colin Kaepernick. Now infamous as the little free agent who started this big war, Kaepernick took cues from his radical Muslim girlfriend and turned the NFL into a stage for his own self-righteousness. The temptation must have been almost irresistible. He knew he would be crowned with glory on SportsCenter the next morning. He knew the New York Times and the Washington Post would fall all over themselves to gild him with accolades. The NFL—and the sports world in general—was the Great White Whale, the last frontier of non-politics in a country now overrun with the stuff. All it took was a flash of insight to realize that the citadel was undefended and all the soldiers in the keep had long since switched sides.

What does this mean for the country? It was never any secret that the American elite hate the United States. We knew that before Jane Fonda mounted her first anti-aircraft gun in North Vietnam. But there is a much larger import to the genuflecting of the barbarians. Just as Christians realized ten years ago, during the mocking of Tim Tebow, that America was not a Christian nation anymore, Americans—even non-religious Americans—with any shred of patriotism left now realize that America isn’t an American nation anymore. We are a nation of virtue signalers. We bow to no God, and certainly to no flag or higher calling. We bedeck ourselves with the rainbow hues and brightly colored bows of our raised awareness, mechanically mimic the lessons we get from all sides from the cultural Marxists, and reverently bend our knees to our own virtue, to our own gloriously virtuous selves—right there on the big screen, for all the world to see.

But this very visibility may prove to be the NFL’s undoing. How much scrutiny will the private lives of its players and owners bear? As the Novena for the Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost has it:

If Thou take Thy grace away, nothing pure in man will stay, all turn’d to ill.

Like the rest of us, the NFL may want to think twice before venerating its own piety in public. But a larger problem remains: in a post-Christian, post-patriotic, and now, probably, post-football America, what is left to hold us all together?

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2017/virtue-signaling-secular-redemption

Editor’s note: Pictured above, Detroit Lions players take a knee during the national anthem before an NFL football game against the Atlanta Falcons in Detroit, Sunday, Sept. 24, 2017. (Photo credit: Paul Sancya | AP Images)