Juan Cole, Star Trek, and Sam Alito

 Over the past few years, I have done a number of written critiques of University of Michigan comedian Juan Cole’s articles in his curiously-named blog, Informed Comment. I have often thought that I had written my last piece on Cole and his tortured logic. Then he comes out with something off-the-wall boffo like this piece marking the death of actress Nichelle Nichols. 

Full disclosure: I have never watched one minute of Star Trek over the years, so I honestly didn’t know who Miss Nichols was other than seeing her image in photos from Star Trek ads etc. With all due respect to her, I was unaware of her on-screen kiss with Priceline pitchman William Shatner back in 1968. Granted, things like that were considered controversial in 1968, but hardly now.

Yet, Cole tries to link all this with US Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito, who recently voted with the majority in overturning Roe vs Wade and sending the abortion issue back to the states to decide. According to Cole, the evil Alito wants to return us to the days when the Nichols-Shatner smooch would be illegal and punishable by law, much as the old miscegenation laws in the old South did. And how does Cole make that leap of logic? He doesn’t other than an attention-getting headline (“How Samuel Alito’s Attack on Privacy Rights could Make that famous Star Trek Kiss between Nichelle Nichols and William Shatner Illegal Again”) and these brief paragraphs at the end of his article:

“Justice Samuel Alito, a strutting martinet, is hell bent on overturning any argument for a right to privacy, and that was the basis for his Dobbs decision annihilating a woman’s right to an abortion.”

“The ACLU is petrified that the natural outcome of Alito’s reactionary counter-revolution in the jurisprudence of liberty is the undoing of the Loving decision. See also Miles Mogulescu in the American Prospect on this danger.”

“So, that famous kiss between Uhuru and Kirk? Alito may have started us down the road of making it illegal, 55 years later.”

That’s it. It’s the intellectual equivalent of 2+ 2= 4,000.

It might also be mentioned that the Supreme Court decision has not “annihilated” a woman’s right to an abortion. In some states, abortion will still be legal with certain reasonable restrictions, in other states, there will be virtually no restrictions, and in some states, the practice may be outlawed meaning that a woman would have to travel to another state. It simply means there is no national right to an abortion.

The fact that Alito and others may differ from Cole on the abortion question means absolutely nothing as to how he (Alito) feels about race and inter-racial marriages, kissing, etc. If Cole knows something that shows that Alito has hostile attitudes towards black people and inter-racial relationships, he should have included it in his article. But he has nothing, so he reverts to a careless association between two unrelated issues and makes the link by citing the right to privacy, something that includes countless unrelated issues. This is what passes for academic thought in our universities today. This is what professors are teaching our children today.