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Sexual McCarthyism, Polyamory, and the First Amendment Robert Hanna Department of Philosophy University of Colorado at Boulder, USA

[Sam Spade] grinned at her, [and] said, Somebody ought to write a book about people some timetheyre peculiar.

--Dashiell Hammett1

1. Ive read and thought lots about the McCarthy erain Dalton Trumbos evocative phrase, the time of the toadand more specifically about the moral character and political implications of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, a.k.a. HUAC. As everyone

knows, the purpose of HUAC was to investigate, punish, and if possible extirpate, membership

in or sympathy for the Communist Party of the USA, a.k.a. the CP-USA, in American cultural

and institutional life, by specifically focusing on Hollywood. Ive also read and thought lots about The Hollywood Tenthe ten Hollywood directors and screenwriters who were forced to appear before HUAC in a show trial in 1947, and then were fired from their jobs by their

Hollywood studio bosses, imprisoned, and blacklisted, for refusing to testify and for contempt of

court, and in particular for refusing to repudiate their Communist beliefs or sympathies and

name names, i.e., denounce their friends and associates. The Ten explicitly and quite reasonably claimed legal and moral protection for their Communist beliefs or sympathies and for

their judicial silence, under the First Amendment. And then, of course, they were fired,

imprisoned, and blacklisted anyway. So much for The Bill of Rights. Ultimately, in the

McCarthy era, many thousands of peopleincluding one former member of my Departmentwere named, investigated, and lost their jobs or were otherwise punished by blacklisting for the

1 D. Hammett, Too Many Have Lived, in D. Hammett, Nightmare Town (New York: Vintage, 2000), pp. 305-320,

at 312. In 1951, Hammett was imprisoned for five months after refusing to name names to a New York state version of HUAC.

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crime or sin of holding Communist beliefs or sympathies. And the plaza right outside the building that houses my Department is named after Dalton Trumbo, in order to remind us of the

cultural, moral, and political oppression of the McCarthy period.

From our contemporary point of view, you might wonder: Why didnt the First Amendment actually protect The Ten and all those other people too? The answer, obviously, is

that the First Amendment or any other purported legal or moral protection of freedom of belief,

speech, or self-expression cannot actually protect anyone in a witch-hunting environment of

fear, hatred, prejudice and taboo. How can you admit that you are, and claim your right to be,

what a witch-hunting mob calls a witch, and still survive?

2. In professional academics, we are now, sadly, in an era of sexual McCarthyism. In the sexual

McCarthyist era, intimate, romantic relationships between academic people (amongst which I

include tenured administrators, tenure track faculty, non-tenure track faculty, graduate students,

and undergraduate students at any and all colleges or universities) are currently regarded with

essentially the same fear, hatred, prejudice, and taboo that membership in or sympathy for the

CP-USA would have triggered more than 60 years ago. There now also exists a perfect analogue

of the unholy union of HUAC and J. Edgar Hoovers McCarthy era FBI, namely the Office of Discrimination and Harassment, a.k.a. the ODH, or its functional equivalent, at virtually every

college and university in North America. Wire-tapping and opening personal mail has its perfect

analogue in the use of e-mail transcripts. And scandal-mongering newspapers, together with

various online accusatory blogs, function as a perfect analogue of the scurrilous Counterattack

and Red Channels. Furthermore, and what is perhaps worst of all, college and university

administrations all over North America are meekly and mindlessly accepting this state of affairs,

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or even paying Uriah Heep-like obeisance to it and zealously forwarding it, just as they did

during the McCarthy era.

3. It is my impression that nearly all human persons seek to have intimate, romantic relationships

with other people. And by intimate, romantic I dont necessarily mean sexual. Even asexual people want intimate, romantic platonic relationships. People simply want to love and to be

loved. At my own university, in order to have an intimate, romantic relationship with another

academic person with whom you stand in some sort of supervisory or otherwise evaluative

relationship, you must first declare this to the university administration. If not, then you can be

fired, suspended, or otherwise disciplined, up to seven years after the fact. Not only that, but

even being accused of wanting to have an intimate, romantic relationship with another academic

person, whether or not you stand in some sort of supervisory or otherwise evaluative relationship

to that person, if that other academic person decides that s/he doesnt now want this relationship, or retrospectively doesnt want to have had it or to have wanted it, for any psychologically peculiar reason whatsoever, up to seven years after the fact, and even though s/he might have

invited it in the first place, is subject to investigation by the ODH and punishment by the

university, including being fired, suspended, or otherwise disciplined, and also informally or

formally blacklisted.

These are bitterly ironic facts, since (i) basically every same-aged/same-career-stage or

older/advanced-career-stage academic person at a given college or university, or within the same

discipline, bears either an actual or really possible supervisory or otherwise evaluative

relationship to every same-aged/same-career-stage or younger/earlier-career-stage academic

person at that college or university, or within the same discipline, and (ii) I am sure that the

majority of all academic people have had, or are now having, intimate, romantic relationships

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with other same-aged/same-career-stage or younger/earlier-career-stage academic people either

at the same college or university, or within the same discipline . Let us call these regular academic couples.

In order for regular academic couples to be formed, they all had to go through the usual

peculiar human rituals of mutual attraction, getting to know each other, dating, communicating

love to each other, etc. And of course for every regular academic couple, there are several other

people, usually also academic people, who were or are unlucky in love with one or another of the members of that regular academic couple, in any of all the peculiarly human ways of having

romantic relationship troubles. But nowadays, when an academic person decides that s/he

doesnt want, or retrospectively doesnt want to have wanted or have had, an intimate, romantic relationship with another academic person, especially one that would lead to the formation of a

regular academic couple, up to seven years after the fact, and even if s/he invited it, this is called

sexual harassment by [the name of the other academic person goes here].

Notice how the phrase sexual harassment sounds a lot like sexual assault and non-rationally evokes the same moral disgust as the latter phrase, even though the phrases actually

mean very different things. But the non-rational emotional association with the ugly phrase

sexual assault is no doubt precisely why the sexual McCarthyites chose the equally ugly phrase sexual harassment, and not, e.g., romantic relationship troubles. Indeed, sexual McCarthyites like to talk about victims of sexual harassment precisely because in fact there are no such people as victims of romantic relationship troublesthere are just people in all their multifarious peculiarity, having the all-too-familiar romantic relationship troubles with each

otherbut they want to evoke, non-rationally, the impression that there are such victims. Even worse, at my University, for instance, the label sexual harassment is irrationally stretched to

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cover everything from originally-welcomed but ex-post-facto-unwanted expressions of romantic

affection over e-mail, and funny or not-so-very-funny jokes that someone took the wrong way, to

rape. But thats like classifying everything from overt sarcastic remarks, or malicious gossip, to brutal murder, under the same label, colleague abuse. Its not only absurd, its sophistical in an entirely pernicious and potentially extremely harmful way.

4. Of course, sexual assault, and any other sexual interaction that is not governed by mutual

moral respect and rational consent, e.g., rape, is immoral. Its entirely awful, evil, and wicked, and no one ever ought to do it.

What I am wanting to point out, however, is that in the era of sexual McCarthyism, many

intimate, romantic relationships, or wanting to have such relationships, even when they are

entirely governed by mutual moral respect and rational consent, are being used as sufficient

grounds for disciplining or firing people, by colleges and universities all over North America.

For example, within the last five years an untenured professor in another humanities department

at my university was summarily fired for having an intimate, romantic relationship with a

graduate student and not declaring it to the university administration first. Question: How many

of us know or have known academic people, including university administrators, who now more

or less fully support the sexual McCarthyite system, who are or were members of regular

academic couples, and in many cases such that one of them is a former student of the other, who

didnt ask any colleges or universitys permission to have this intimate, romantic relationship, and who (more importantly) would have thought that this was an entirely morally unacceptable

restriction of their freedom had they been forced to do so? Their support of the sexual

McCarthyite system is sheer hypocrisy.

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Moreover, many intimate, romantic relationships, or wanting to have such relationships,

especially when they would lead (or would have led) to the formation of a regular academic

couple, even when they are entirely governed by mutual moral respect and rational consent, are

also being investigated by ODH offices and then punished by colleges and universities all over

North America, provided that one academic of the academic persons, usually (but not always) a

woman, complains about the other academic person, usually (but not always) a man, up to seven

years after the fact. If the sexual harassment complaint doesnt stick, then they will still get the other academic person for unprofessional conduct. More bluntly, for the academic person who is the target of the complaint, then once the complaint has gotten to the investigation stage, that

person is screwed: the complainant always gets the benefit of all the doubts, no matter how

psychologically peculiar his/her reason might be for bringing such a complaint to the ODH.

Indeed, and as a consequence, many academic people, usually (but not always) women,

sometimes pushed by their jealous partners, but also sometimes pushed by their senior female or

male colleagues, or for Machiavellian identity-politics reasonsor sometimes out of sheer malice, just because they canhave recently learned that the ODH and sexual harassment complaints are extremely effective weapons for silencing and terrorizing other academic people,

usually (but not always) men, and for taking revenge for past slights, real or imagined. I know

this first-hand, because it has happened in my own Department several times in recent years. Let

me repeat: The ODH and sexual harassment complaints are being used by some academic people, sanctimoniously and self-servingly, as weapons against other academic people. It is

simply a fact, but no one ever talks about it out loud or in print, for fear ofbeing denounced to the ODH and found guilty of sexual harassment or unprofessional conduct, of course. Notice, too, that in the sexual McCarthyite era, even just being accused of sexual harassment,

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for any reason whatsoever on the part of the accuser, no matter how psychologically peculiar, is

deemed by university administrations to be tantamount to unprofessional conduct. So too in the McCarthy era, even just being named as a communist or commie sympathizer, for any reason whatsoever on the part of the accuser, no matter how psychologically peculiar, was

enough to get many thousands of people fired from their jobs and/or blacklisted.

5. There is a sexual orientation known as being polyamorous, which means being disposed to

falling and being in love with more than one person at once. In practicethat is, the practice of polyamorythis means seeking and having more than one mutually morally respectful marriage-like relationship at a time. So in that sense, it could be called ethical polygamy. For an extremely

fair-minded, carefully researched, and well-argued discussion of polyamory in all its

psychological, social, legal, moral, and philosophical aspects, you could read the legal scholar

Elizabeth Emenss long and brilliant paper, Monagamys Law: Compulsory Monogamy and Polyamorous Existence

http://www.law.uchicago.edu/files/files/58-monogamy.pdf

But for a more popular and shorter presentation of the basic issues, also very fair-minded, instead

you could simply watch Ida Lupinos equally brilliant but little-known film, The Bigamist

https://archive.org/details/the_bigamist

No one who is even minimally reflective can help thinking, as they take Edmund OBrien off to jail at the end of the movie, What exactly did he do that morally undermines The American Way of Life?

6. People who have admitted to themselves that they are polyamorous have also rationally

chosen this way of life, for better or worse. So in these respects, their sexual orientation is

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exactly like that of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, or queer people, a.k.a. LGBTQ people.

Theyre all just who they are: theyre peculiar, just like all people everywhere and everywhen; but polyamorous people are also sharply different from the serially monogamous, heterosexual

norm in contemporary North American society; and therefore theyre subject to various kinds of fear, hatred, prejudice, and taboo.

7. Now I want to bring together sexual McCarthyism and polyamory. Currently, being L,G, B,

T, or Q is morally cool in the academic world, by which I mean that not only is it regarded as

fully morally permissible in that world, it is also in a sense affirmed and celebrated. But

polyamory is not morally cool in the academic world. It is the sexual orientation Whose Name is

Not Spoken. Why? Why isnt LGBTQ actually LGBTQP?

One reason is that virtually all non-LGBTQ people and LGBTQ academic people alike

still more or less unreflectively think that serial monogamy is the moral norm for intimate,

romantic relationships. Think of the righteous campaign for Gay and Lesbian marriage.

Rationally and morally speaking, however, why is serial monogamy the moral norm and also the

law? What is the real moral difference between serial monogamy (i.e., multiple marriage-like

relationships over time) and polyamory (i.e, multiple marriage-like relationships at a time)?

Someone once said to me, OK, but polyamory would be so tiring, and I couldnt deal with that. Right. But thats just an honest admission that her heart was prudentially closed in certain ways, and certainly not a moral argument against polyamory. Polyamory, by contrast, means

having a more open heart: loving more people than just one. So polyamorous people are more

open-hearted and more loving. But why is this a sin?

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The right answer, of course, is: it isnt a sin. Polyamory, just like being serially monogamous and heterosexual, being lesbian, being gay, etc., is perfectly morally permissible,

provided that it is governed by ethical principles of mutual moral respect and rational consent.

But here is where the other and more important reason why, in professional academics,

LGBTQ isnt LGBTQP, kicks in. The reason is sexual McCarthyism. If polyamory were morally cool too, then this fact would significantly get in the way of some academic people

sanctimoniously and self-servingly using the ODH and sexual harassment complaints as weapons against other academic people, including polyamorous ones. And it gives them coercive

power to be able to do so. And they enjoy having coercive power over their colleagues.

Ultimately, then, that is why in contemporary professional academics its only serially monogamous LGBTQ thats morally acceptable, and not LGBTQP.

8. Now generalizing, I strongly believe that all those academic people at any North American

college or university who are now sanctimoniously and self-servingly using the ODH and

sexual harassment complaints as weapons against other academic people, especially including polyamorous people, are themselves acting immorally. Whatever their peculiar motivations,

theyre acting just like those people who sanctimoniously and self-servingly named names to HUAC and Hoovers FBI in the McCarthy era. That is, theyre not just the usual run of peculiar humanity doing the usual peculiarly human things: in Kants moral terminology, theyre treating other people as mere things; or in my mothers more punchy moral terminology, theyre nasty pieces of work .

9. As you might imagine, being an academic person who is a member of the polyamorous

minority, or even just defending the moral permissibility of being polyamorous, in a sexual

McCarthyist world, could get you into serious trouble. And it actually has gotten some academic

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people into serious trouble. So without any hope whatsoever that it will make any difference

whatsoeverI remember what happened to The TenI hereby claim my First Amendment rights to say what I really think about sexual McCarthyism and polyamory in this new time of the

toad.