"Choice and Truth" - Commentary by Tony Seton

Choice and Truth

Lawrence Summers has stepped in it again, and again he has made things worse by seeming to apologize...when he shouldn’t have. Summers, the president of Harvard got into trouble a while back with black professors as the esteemed university. They essentially claimed that he was a racist. He tried to defuse the criticism, to preserve harmony, and one of the leading critics, after the supplication, left for Princeton.

Now Summers has his tongue in a sling because he says that men and women are different and the differences are not necessarily cultural. What a concept. His point, in part, was that discrimination is not the only reason why there are limited numbers of female scientists and engineers. Let me interject also that only six percent of the pilots in this country are women and while it’s true that there is some discrimination everywhere, that statistic is so breathtaking stark and that it is statistically impossible to suggest that its foundation is oppression by men.

Summers was addressing a conference on women and minorities in the sciences and at one point made the observation that when one of his daughters was very young, she was given two trucks in an effort to expose her to a gender-neutral toys. The child, he said, named them "daddy truck"' and "baby truck" as if they were dolls.

Apparently an MIT biologist found this line of thought so upsetting that she walked out. Some others among the 50 invitation-only attendees were also distressed. Others weren’t. And the truth is that none of them should have been. Not if they were intellectually honest, that is.

Summers wasn’t relegating women to second-class citizenship; he was saying that gender-wise predilections should be studied. To say that there aren’t innate differences between the sexes is absurd. To say that we shouldn’t learn more about the differences is heresy.

Also in the news, an unmarried 66-year-old Romanian professor and author of children's books who had undergone fertility treatments for nine years has given birth through a C-section. She’d been carrying triplets; one died after 10 weeks, another was stillborn. I can’t remember that last time I agreed with a Western religious leader, but I think a local bishop might have unmixed the baby with the bath water when he said, "This was a selfish act."

Because it’s not just about rights but about responsibilities, not just choice but truth.

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.