But not at Yale. In April the school announced a $1 million-plus grant from the brother of playwright alum Larry Kramer to found the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University. While Larry Kramer may be successful in his field, he’s anything but dignified.

Kramer happens to be the founder of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), a militant homosexual outfit which spent the late ‘80s and early ‘90s throwing public temper tantrums pretty much anyplace they could get attention. They broke into buildings, smashed windows, stormed church services, shouted down speakers, threw condoms at people, "outed" allegedly gay politicians and generally sought to intimidate and terrorize society at large. Their tactics, a cofounder of the group’s Washington, D.C.-chapter (Eric Pollard) later confessed, were drawn largely from Hitler’s Mein Kampf; they were, in Pollard’s words, "a truly fascist organization."

Yet after a couple of years ACT UP wasn’t radical enough for Kramer, who called for riots in the streets and publicly mused over the need for more radical tactics. ("The new phase is terrorism," he mused to a Los Angeles Times reporter in 1990. "I don’t know whether it means burning buildings or killing people or setting fire to yourselves.") He became known for raving, obscenity-laced tirades. He charged Ronald Reagan and George Bush (Sr.) with using AIDS for "intentional genocide." He called the head of the government’s effort to cure AIDS a "murderer." He fired off nasty remarks at everyone in sight (to journalist Robert MacNeil: "You pompous, heterosexual twit"). He alienated even other homosexual activists, who described him with words like "shrill" and "bully."

So you might wonder why Yale would even want to name anything after Kramer, with all his baggage — including some of the things he’d said about Yale.

For his part, Kramer didn’t make it easy. He first offered $5 million for a homosexual-studies center in 1997, but he insisted on dictating details of how the money would be spent, insisting on a curriculum and a permanent, full-time professor that Yale said it couldn’t fund on an ongoing basis. Negotiations broke down, and Kramer decried the university as a "homophobic institution."

But Yale is as liberal as most universities, if not more so, and is considered one of the more pro-gay schools around. When things fells through with Kramer, it created a lesbian-and-gay-studies concentration within the women’s studies program. The lesbian professor behind that move then convinced Kramer that Yale was now "serious." The following year the negotiations resumed, leading to the current deal — and to hints from Kramer that he may leave the school his multimillion-dollar estate to fund homosexual programs.

Surveying this scene, I’m struck by the ethical inversion that’s taken place over just a couple decades. Official academia has gone from sharing the broad societal disapproval of homosexuality to regarding it as an all-excusing moral license. It’s inconceivable Yale would have named a program after a straight, white, right-wing male who behaved the way Kramer routinely does, much less one who’s called for violence in the streets. But if you’re gay, you get to break all the other rules while you’re at it; you can toss out not only sexual morality, but tired old bourgeois values like civility too.

Not that all gays, or even most, act like Larry Kramer. But as far as academia’s concerned, they can if they want, because only pompous heterosexual twits would worry about enforcing standards of civilized conduct when we all should be bending over backwards to make up for our "homophobia." Of course gays aren’t the first group to be granted this license. On almost any campus, protesting feminists or racial minorities have long been able to invade and occupy buildings without fear of discipline, let alone expulsion or prosecution.

The point is that homosexuality’s approved status hasn’t arrived in a vacuum. It’s come as part of a general erosion of standards, to the point that it’s reminiscent of decadent Israel in the book of Judges, where "everybody did as he saw fit." In fact, the only standards that are enforced are strictures against people who seek to uphold the old standards. (Opponents of homosexuality are all presumptively guilty of "hate speech.") The ethical inversion is pretty near complete.

I’ve written before ("Gay Culture 101") that these developments shouldn’t surprise Christians, because once we reject God, we get a culture where, as Dostoyevsky said, "everything is permissible." But a lot of people who aren’t Christians have an intuitive moral revulsion (what Romans 2:15 calls the "law ... written on their hearts") against living in such a culture. A lot of others have at least a vague, gut-level unease about the trends. It’s worth letting them know the story of Larry Kramer’s canonization at prestigious Yale. It might be just the wake-up call they need.