Day By Day© by Chris Muir.

Thursday, January 20, 2005

No apologies necessary, for Goodness sake!

I'm just spitting pins and needles over this one from Reuters:

"Harvard University President Lawrence Summers has written a lengthy apology, admitting he was wrong to suggest women do not have the same natural ability in math and sciences as men.
First of all, I'm disgusted with Reuters' spin on what Summers actually said. He did not entirely abase himself. Instead, as Reuters itself explains a few paragraphs down, what he really said was
"I deeply regret the impact of my comments and apologize for not having weighed them more carefully," Summers said in a letter to the Harvard community posted on his Web site and dated Wednesday. "I was wrong to have spoken in a way that has resulted in an unintended signal of discouragement to talented girls and women."
This is a tactful way of saying that his opponents are idiots, incapable of dealing with logical quesetions. And second, this was indeed a logical question for Summers to ask. He did absolutely nothing wrong in suggesting that, considering how consistently women fall behind men in math and science, a logical area of inquiry is whether there are innate differences. For Goodness sake -- we already know men and women are different. That's why there aren't any pregnant men walking around the streets. Women love to tout the differences when it comes to excusing conduct with PMS, and post-partum depression, and bonding hormones and mothering hormones, but there's no acknowledgement that some of these differences might not be painted as virtues. (Just to set the record straight, I'm a woman, too.) The thought-police are going way too far when they deny us the right even to ask questions to explain things around us. What's ludicrous is that, politically, these are the same thought police who deny Creationism on the ground that it is the antithesis of the "question-asking" approach the defines science, and distinguishes it from faith. UPDATE: Just read Collin Levey's on-the-nose article in the NY Post pointing out how the same women's organizations that are after Summers' blood for daring to raise reasonable questions about undisputed facts, are completely ignoring (or are deeply offended by) the fact that Condoleezza Rice is coming up to be the first black woman, and the youngest woman, ever to serve as Secretary of State. UPDATE II: Just read Ruth Wisse's enjoyable op-ed at the Wall Street Journal about the whole Summers' hoo-ha. You have to pay, but if you do, you'll get interesting information such as this:
This accusation of bias, advanced by feminists and often accepted at face value by the academic community, attempts to transform guarantees of equal opportunity into a demand for equal outcome. Thus, a huge majority of female professors at Harvard recently formed a Caucus for Gender Equality to protest the drop in senior job offers to women since President Summers came into office. Offering no evidence of discrimination in hiring and not a single example of a superior female applicant overlooked in favor of a less qualified male, the Caucus charged the president with having reduced "diversity" by failing to hire enough female professors.
Wisse, incidentally is herself a professor at Harvard.