pro-life vs. gender-bending: will the real "avant-garde" please stand up?

From an essay by Micah Mattix-- about two events that occurred within a week of each other at UNC where he is a lecturer in English-- as it appeared in Touchstone...

Mattix overstates his case a bit, given the recent gains on the abortion issue-- especially among the young-- a near no-brainer given the related science. But, he's correct in pressing this comparison to great effect!

The first event was a new play put on by the local performing arts group. The play, which was based on Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), was billed as a “gender-bending” play that would push the limits of experimental drama in its exploration of human sexuality....a story in the student newspaper...was careful to note that students were not...shocked by the play’s content...

The executive director of the theater himself was not worried that the play would somehow be too shocking. “One of the great hallmarks of our audience,” he claimed, “is that they are risk-takers.”

That appetite for risk, however, disappeared two days later. The Carolina Students for Life erected several large Justice for All placards on campus, which contained pictures of unborn children being aborted. In striking contrast to how the play was received, the response generated by this display was overwhelmingly negative.

Unaware of any inherent contradiction in their reactions, many pro-choice students complained in the student newspaper...

In theory, at least, one of the goals of the avant-garde has been to attack the tastes and moral sensibilities of the bourgeois. It has thus presented works containing subject matter that was indeed considered shocking at the time...

The avant-garde theater at Chapel Hill, however, no longer attacks the sensibilities of the students, but rather provides them with the sort of work they want to see in the first place—work that does not challenge their moral paradigm, but confirms it...What is really avant-garde today, in the original, combative sense of the term, is to stand for life, for beauty, and for truth. Nothing shocks us more.