From the safety of his bunker, Rod Dreher mocks "safe spaces"
Not that the phenomenon doesn't richly deserve mocking. I've glanced at and excerpted this so that, mercifully, you will be spared reading the whole thing:
So when she heard last fall that a student group had organized a debate about campus sexual assault between Jessica Valenti, the founder of feministing.com, and Wendy McElroy, a libertarian, and that Ms. McElroy was likely to criticize the term “rape culture,” Ms. Byron was alarmed. “Bringing in a speaker like that could serve to invalidate people’s experiences,” she told me. It could be “damaging.”
Ms. Byron and some fellow task force members secured a meeting with administrators. Not long after, Brown’s president, Christina H. Paxson, announced that the university would hold a simultaneous, competing talk to provide “research and facts” about “the role of culture in sexual assault.” Meanwhile, student volunteers put up posters advertising that a “safe space” would be available for anyone who found the debate too upsetting.
However, what deserves mocking even more, if that's possible, is Brave Sir Roddy standing tall on the ramparts over it
Why
Let's remember that, for decades now, any comment seriously critical of anything Dreher says has had less chance of getting approved by his personal self-validating "curating" process than a poisoned quail would have had making it through the gauntlet of Louis XIV's food tasters.
But Rod has not only been obsessed with making his own space safe for his "experiences" to remain "validated" beyond contest, he's felt it necessary to reach out into other peoples spaces, for example, his local Topix forum, and have content he feels threatens to validate his experiences removed.
Finally, can we recall the very reason itself for Rod's upcoming book on how Dante saved his life? That's right, because out in that horribly unsafe space I casually refer to as "the world" Rod's family remained stubborn beyond his curating, and even dared to invalidate his experiences, throwing him hopelessly into a "dark wood".
So when people think I'm being too hard on Rod Dreher, I beg to differ. I'm only helping him to overcome the terrible crippling condition of being a "special snowflake" he's cultivated in and for himself, year in and year out, now heading into middle age, as a deformed human being, a hypocritical, pathological bully, forever punching down on those weaker than himself while squealing about his suffering and begging for pity, someone manifestly without the courage to recognize what everyone else has long ago, that the qualities and behavioral urges he constantly condemns in others are those he most intimately recognizes and most fiercely loathes in himself - but will forever be too cowardly to address where they really lurk, in that cozy Benedictine Option corner deep inside himself.
