Oh, those beleaguered straights.

InsideHigherEd.com today reports on efforts in the Texas state legislature to "require any public college with a student center on 'alternative' sexuality to provide equal funding to create new centers to promote 'traditional values.'"

Proponents have framed the measure as an effort to get equal time for heterosexuality on public campuses where, apparently, straight folks barely get the time of day. A political interest group, the Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT), worked with State Representative Wayne Christian in crafting the legislation, but its goal was to not to carve out equal resources for heterosexual programming and support, but to get universities to defund centers serving GBLT students.

The YCT doesn't think universities should be funding the promotion of any kind of sexuality or values. Sounds egalitarian, doesn't it? But YCT Vice Chairman, Tony McDonald lets us know what this move is really about: "It is clear that our public universities are funding centers which promote a radical political and social agenda in favor of normalizing homosexuality and expanding homosexual rights."

Basically, the YCT and fellow travelers have fallen back on the litany of privilege that we have heard before from whites and males arguing against affirmative action, or straights fighting civil rights protections for GLBT people: the minority group aggressively promotes and agenda while the dominant group simply wants to 'live and let live;' the minority group gets all these extra rights while the dominant group is victimized. It's another round of "reverse discrimination," but this time for those poor straight people, who apparently can't cross campus without "pansexual" weirdos waylaying them, or gays sneakily luring them into deviant lifestyles. It is one of the whines of privilege--your existence on the same field with me is an affront to my tender identity, so stop complaining (you've never had it so good, anyway).

I'm all for carefully reviewing university budgets, and, frankly, I'd like to see more resources dedicated to the classroom rather than student services--but US universities have long had functions besides transmitting and generating knowledge--they are mechanisms of social mobility and socialization, they are laboratories of social change, and since the tremendous expansion of higher education after WW II, they have become this place where parents send their children to practice adulthood--hence all the support services for young adults trying to navigate the world outside their homes, as well as their often tumultuous internal worlds.