Opinion: Deters' defenders try to invoke fear of cancel culture

In a recent guest opinion, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost offers boilerplate and tired gripes about the more than 700 students, faculty and staff calling for Xavier University to rescind Supreme Court Justice Joe Deters recent appointment to "justice in residence" ("Xavier petition to cancel Deters the opposite of higher learning," March 20).

Yost claims these petitioners wish to have Deters' views "removed from their sight and hearing" because "they've been raised in an age of cancel culture where the mere hearing of views with which one disagrees is violence." However, their rejection of Deters appointment is substantive, moral and principled. They have analyzed the views, heard the arguments and rejected the values they represent.

This is, by definition, an exchange of ideas.

While Yost grumbles that these "objections have nothing to do with values, and everything to do with politics," the publicly available petition tells a different story. Deters’ 2018 call for Ohio to bring back the firing squad is the primary anathema to Jesuit values that the petition raises, supported by the Vatican’s condemnation of Deters for these views.

Similarly, the petition disagrees with Deters’ dismissive caricature of calls for racial justice in policing. As we speak, the Cincinnati Police Department is embroiled in a scandal involving an established pattern of its officers using racial slurs, Black Cincinnatians are much more likely to be victims of police brutality, and Black Ohioans are imprisoned at six times the rate of their white neighbors. These objections and counterarguments are hardly about hurt feelings, but Yost deliberately mischaracterizes them as an ad hominem attack on Deters that "decrie(s) him as a racist."

Yost concludes his piece with a condescending recommendation that the petitioners read R. R. Palmer’s "Twelve Who Ruled," a 1941 history of the Reign of Terror (one wonders when Yost’s own commitment to "higher learning" ceded to complacency). He invokes this violent phase of the French Revolution, characterized by paranoid rulers and public executions, as a cautionary tale demonstrating the dangers of "mob rule." His analogy ironically overlooks the fact that the petitioners object to Deters specifically because he called for Ohio to restore firing squads − a gruesome public display of state power designed to suppress dissent and mandate conformity echoing the Committee for Public Safety’s penchant for the guillotine.

Yost wants us to believe that a segment of a small Jesuit university asserting their wish not to confer Xavier’s prestige on a justice whose views they find substantively objectionable are akin to the Reign of Terror. What he obscures is a more fitting comparison to the Committee for Public Safety: an unelected state official (Supreme Court justice) promoting capital punishment as a disciplinary spectacle and an elected official (say, an attorney general) carrying out those executions and publishing paranoid editorials about how college students are the real threat.

But Yost’s letter isn’t about intellectual honesty, it’s about propagating a fear of "cancel culture." Even if the 700-plus signatories of the petition were all students (and they are not because I signed it), this would represent a mere 10% of Xavier’s student population. This is hardly a consensus, never mind a cultural crisis. But let’s indulge Yost’s grievance: What exactly would the consequences of Deters’ "cancellation" in this context be?

Rather than giving a few lectures and participating in a few events on the campus of a small private university, Deters would have to return to his part-time job as a state Supreme Court Justice. A cancelled Deters would have to settle for expressing his views as part of a conservative majority that will decide major cases that affect 12 million Ohioans.

Yost’s complaint forms part of a generations-long cycle of conservatives bemoaning how college students reject the orthodoxy of previous generations − or, to put it differently, how younger generations get exposed to new ideas, produce new knowledge, and bring new insights based on a world that is materially different than it was when Yost was reading an already dusty copy of "Twelve Who Ruled" on campus.

R.J. Boutelle is assistant professor of English at the University of Cincinnati.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Opinion: Deters' defenders try to invoke fear of cancel culture