Yale’s Agony Over Social Justice

Last night Yale’s campus pro-life
group—after a year in which they participated in meetings and even helped raise
money for the organization—became the first group in living memory to be denied
membership in the Social Justice Network of Dwight Hall. Billing itself as an
“independent” and “non-sectarian” center for public service and social justice,
Dwight Hall at Yale is a group that seeks
“to foster civic-minded student leaders and to promote service and activism in
New Haven and around the world.” Though legally independent, it is the university umbrella organization for
service and advocacy, encompassing dozens of member organizations that address
almost every conceivable issue, from the environment, to gay rights, to
Palestinian statehood.

Membership would have given Choose Life at Yale (CLAY) access
to a variety of resources, including coveted meeting locations, use of Dwight
Hall’s vehicles for service projects, and a seat at the table during Dwight
Hall’s freshman recruiting events. But most of all it would have affirmed the
conviction of CLAY members that the cause they served, whether by marching in
DC or volunteering at a crisis pregnancy center, was a legitimate component of
social justice.

Social justice is a term that has
perhaps been used too indiscriminately for its own good, and members of Dwight
Hall’s Social Justice Network might be surprised to learn that the term arose
from the writings of a reactionary Italian Jesuit. But regardless of the
history, it seems to me that if social justice means anything, it has to
recognize the social nature of the type
of justice it describes. Social justice is about our relationships with one
another and with institutions, not our individuality and autonomy. That’s why,
contrary to many of my friends on the right, it makes a good deal of sense to me
to describe inescapably communal issues such as environmental degradation as
the proper subjects of social justice.

There’s a deeper truth that can be expressed
in the term, though, in an age in which justice simply expressed is so often
seen solely as a matter of individual autonomy. Social justice helps to remind
us that humans are social by nature, and that nearly all of our decisions carry
social consequences, often far greater than we can see. It can express the
truth that the presence of the homeless on the streets of one of the wealthiest
universities in the world is not merely a matter of the right to a hot meal and
a roof, but is also the breakdown of a relationship between members of a
community. Social injustice is a communal failure to love.

It’s this sense that made Choose Life
at Yale a natural fit for the social justice hub of Yale. Pro-lifers at Yale
have long gotten over the idea that they’d get anywhere arguing with their
peers about whose right to autonomy trumped whose, and so they charted a new
direction. They took up their cause as a matter of social justice. They
realized that abortion has never been solely a matter of a baby’s life and
liberty. It’s about the desperation and hopelessness of the mother that walked
into the clinic. It’s about the grandfather who will never put that little girl
in his lap. It’s about the classmates who will never sit next to her, and the
boy who will never work up the courage to write her that awkward poem. It’s
even about that friend who she would drift away from over the years, the
successful sister who would make her insecure, and the God she’d curse when she
lost her job and then her mortgage. The biggest lie in all this is that the
choice to end (or to save) a life is a solitary one.

We don’t know why Dwight Hall
denied membership to the pro-life group. The ballot was secret and the count
unannounced, and the established procedure (perhaps ironically for a social
justice organization) allotted only sixty seconds for CLAY to make their case
while strictly banning any further discussion. We know it couldn’t have been perceived
religious differences, since Dwight Hall already contains Christian, Jewish,
and secular groups. We know it couldn’t be CLAY’s political advocacy, because
Dwight Hall endorses advocacy—even legislative advocacy—as part of its mission
and a core component of many of its groups’ activities.

Perhaps it is because CLAY’s work
cuts too close to the core. Perhaps it makes many of Dwight Hall’s leaders
uncomfortable to be challenged by the witness of pro-lifers taking time from
their week to serve women in need, whether in order to ease their choice for
life or to help them heal after they have chosen otherwise. Perhaps it
challenges their comfortably individualistic assumptions about abortion because
it is too close to what they themselves do when they feed the hungry, clothe
the poor, or care for the sick. Perhaps it makes some of them—if only for a
brief moment—rethink the meaning of the call to love and serve. That would
explain why they have to push it away so quickly and quietly, because they know
that this is how social justice movements begin.

Matthew Gerken is a
former president of Choose Life at Yale.

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