The students of the University of Wyoming deserved better. Their commencement speaker was an awful Republican who said stupid things.
Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) was resoundingly booed on Saturday while giving a commencement address at the University of Wyoming after she said it is a “fundamental scientific truth” that there can only be males and females.
“There are those in government who believe not that the creator endowed us with inalienable rights … but that government created those rights,” Lummis said in her speech. “And the government should redefine those rights, including our rights to freedom of speech, religion, property, assembly and to keep and bear arms. Even fundamental scientific truths — such as the existence of two sexes, male and female — are subject to challenge these days.”
Students erupted in boos and jeers after that last sentence — and they continued on for nearly 30 seconds as Lummis stood awkwardly smiling onstage.
You can watch the moment here, starting right around the 49:40 mark.
Good for the students booing her. She seems to think that Jesus created “rights”, that they weren’t the product of human beings writing rules down. She thinks “two sexes” is a scientific truth, when the science she excludes and doesn’t understand says that sex is much more complicated and diverse than she imagines.
If you just listen to that short segment, though you’ll miss the other lunacies in her speech. A minute or two before that, she was plugging Bitcoin. After her “two sexes” bit, she talks about her favorite contemporary non-fiction author
, who is…Eric Metaxas? Well, there’s the problem right there. She thinks a conservative evangelical pundit who writes children’s books supporting Donald Trump, with titles like Donald Builds the Wall and Donald Drains the Swamp, who writes bad biographies praising Christian leaders, whose writing is full of nothing but god-talk, who is an anti-vaxxer, is an example of a non-fiction author.
Lummis is a deluded, ignorant fool. Wyoming is a conservative state, so I can understand how she got elected, but I used to expect a university to promote just the best and brightest, and the University of Wyoming failed on that point.
Also, as of February of this year, Lummis owns about $200,000 worth of Bitcoin. I don’t know what that’s worth now (I hope much less), but using a commencement speech to shill for your personal profit is kind of gross.