A conservative nominee for federal court has had his nomination withdrawn after not even enough Republicans could get behind voting for him.
Ryan Bounds garnered attention when people was made aware of articles he wrote during his undergraduate days at Stanford University. In his writings he attacks tolerance and diversity, mocks the LGBT community and says perhaps colleges shouldn’t kick rapists out of school.
“During my years in our Multicultural Garden of Eden, I have often marveled at the odd strategies that some of the more strident racial factions of the student body employ in their attempts to ‘heighten consciousness,’ ‘build tolerance,’ ‘promote diversity’ and otherwise convince us to partake of that fruit which promises to open our eyes to a PC version of the knowledge of good and evil,” he wrote in February 1995. “I am mystified because these tactics seem always to contribute more to restricting consciousness, aggravating intolerance and pigeonholing cultural identities than many a Nazi bookburning.”
He scorned the idea of racial organizations on campus, saying those who participate “divide up by race for their feel-good ethnic hoedowns.”
“Whenever a group of white males happens to be at the same place at the same time, you can be sure that the foul stench of oppression and exploitation lingers in the air,” according to Bounds. “In contrast, ethnic centers, whose sole purpose is to bring together exclusive cliques of students to revel in racial purity, are so righteous that the mere mention of cutting budgets incites turmoil on the grandest scale.”
“The existence of ethnic organizations is no inevitable prerequisite to maintaining a diverse community — white students, after all, seem to be doing all right without an Aryan Student Union,” he wrote.
Stanford’s student body is about 45 percent white today, and it was likely even less diverse during Bounds’ time.
Republicans realized their nominee would lose when Sen. Tim Scott, the only Black senator for the GOP, said he would not vote for Bounds. He then had a conversation with fellow GOP Sen. Marco Rubio, who indicated he too could not vote for Bounds. This reportedly led to more senators saying they’d likely vote no.
In a different article Bounds called sensitivity “the phantom that threatens us and our community.” His article came in response to a required sensitivity training at the university following the defecation of a statue celebrating gay pride.
He also seemed to come to the defense of those believed to be responsible for the vandalism:
We hear of sensations of personal violation and outrage and of suspicion that male athletes and fraternity members are bigots whose socialization patterns induce this sort of terrorism. Perhaps all of this is true, but the castigation of athletes and frat boys for flagrantly anti-homosexual prejudices is predicated on a motivation for this vandalism that has not been articulated. Results The vandals might face hate-crime charges, fraternity members — regardless of their individually demonstrated prejudices (or, for that matter, sexual orientation) — face mandatory Sensitivity training, the Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Community Center receives $10,000 from funds the university ostensibly does not have, and Sensitivity insinuates itself a little further into the fissures of our community.
And regarding how the university handles rape allegations
“But there is nothing really inherently wrong with the University failing to punish an alleged rapist — regardless his guilt — in the absence of adequate certainty; there is nothing that the University can do to objectively ensure that the rapist does not strike again,” he wrote, adding, “[e]xpelling students is probably not going to contribute a great deal toward a rape victim’s recovery; there is no moral imperative to risk egregious error in doing so.”
Bounds offered a lackluster apology in May. But he only said he was sorry for his “rhetoric,” which was “overheated” and “overbroad,” but still called his views a part of “debating campus politics.”
