Response to David Hawpe's flip-flop in the C-J

(David Edmunds' letter appeared in the C-J on 7/12)

In last Sunday’s editorial, David Hawpe denounces The Family Foundation for raising questions concerning the expenditure of tax dollars on left-wing political activism at a university that talks a good game on the issue of diversity, but doesn’t appear to want to practice it.

In a Feb 23,2005 CJ opinion piece, “Academics give way to activism and it’s not a change for the better,” the writer raised a similar concern: that grant money from political activist Carla Wallace, who had “ties with Fidel Castro,” would be used to support “left-liberal interests, including Yassir Arafat.”

The author of the 2005 article was David Hawpe.

But when we raised similar questions about UofL using the same money plus 1million in taxpayer dollars on scholars whose specialty is research on “male-bodied drag queens” and UK funding the agenda of Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and the Fairness Alliance, Hawpe’s concern over political activism suddenly gave way to liberal sanctimony.

Most of us wouldn’t care if the head of Planned Parenthood were teaching math or literature at UK, but teaching “abortion and family planning” at taxpayer expense and promoting one particular political agenda in the name of academic freedom and diversity, will come as unwelcome news to taxpayers.

UK is now paying homosexual couples $100.00 for interviews about the negative impact of The Marriage Amendment (www.prismresearch.org ) We wonder how Hawpe would react if our public universities, instead of running down the Marriage Amendment, which over 70 percent of Kentuckians approved, were promoting it.

(The C-J chose to delete the above website reference and change the sentence that mentions interviewing people "about the negative impact of The Marriage Amendment" to "interviews about challenges they face outside their relationship.")