Degrees of honor: whom colleges reward, says a lot.

MOST colleges that grant honorary degrees would endorse the sentiment, expressed by a Cambridge University spokesman, that "an honorary degree is the highest accolade the University can give." So what does it mean that Hamilton College decided to bestow this garland of official commendation on Mary Bonauto, the activist lawyer and former director of the Boston-based Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD)? Ms. Bonauto, who graduated from Hamilton in 1983, was in the public eye most recently when she successfully argued the case for same-sex "marriage" before the Massachusetts supreme court in 2003. It was for this act of benevolence that a friend of mine described Bonauto as "one of the foremost legal threats to the institution of marriage as we know it in the Western tradition."

Bonauto's great rhetorical feat in the case in question, Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, was to get the court to believe that same-sex "marriage" was a civil-rights issue. Here's the reasoning: Marriage brings a wide variety of social benefits to the married couple, ergo if Mary Jo is not allowed to marry Mary Grace, they have been discriminated against. Just like the blacks when there was slavery.

Yes, yes, I know: As an argument it is pitiful. But it populates the world with illusory rights and pushes all the buttons liberals thrill to push. "Oh my God, have we really been discriminating against an entire subpopulation for all of recorded history? Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Let's change the law. Right now."

The technical term for Ms. Bonauto's argument is hornswoggle. No one says that homosexuals may not marry. They just may not marry someone of the same sex. Why? Because "marriage" means the union of a man and a woman. (Not just any man and woman, of course: You may not marry your sister or brother or father or mother; in many places you may not marry your first cousin.) To pretend otherwise is to indulge in the Humpty Dumpty approach to semantics: "But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knockdown argument,' Alice objected. 'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less.'"

Nice work if you can get it, but not something that should impress a judge.

Before we indulge in too much admiration for Bonauto's rhetorical skills--perhaps "sophistical skills" would be more accurate--it is worth noting that in this case she was greatly aided by the fact that she was addressing a court extremely well disposed to the issue of same-sex "marriage." The chief justice of the Massachusetts supreme court is Margaret Marshall, a vocal friend of the idea of same-sex "marriage." It is almost too good to be true, but it is true: Justice Marshall is married to Anthony Lewis, the Frank Rich of yesteryear, the man who for decades held down the left flank on the editorial page of the New York Times. It's the Empedoclean principle of like-flocking-to-like in action.

A Hamilton College news release touts Ms. Bonauto's role as lead counsel in Goodridge, but it does not dilate on her efforts a few years before in the so-called "Fistgate" scandal. In March 2000, a statewide conference called "Teach-Out" was held at Tufts University. Sponsored by the Massachusetts Department of Education, the Governor's Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth, and the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, the conference invited teenagers and children as young as twelve from around the state to participate in workshops on such themes as "Ask the Transsexuals," "Early Childhood Educators: How to Decide Whether to Come Out or Not," "Diesel Dykes and Lipstick Lesbians: Defining and Exploring Butch/Femme Identity," "The Religious Wrong: Dealing Effectively with Opposition in Your Community," and "Starting a Gay/Straight Alliance in Your School." One alarmed parent taped some of the proceedings--to no avail, for Ms. Bonauto found another sympathetic judge who issued a gag order preventing the distribution of the tape. They grow a very special sort of judge in the People's Republic of Massachusetts.

I very much doubt that Hamilton will go into this episode when they confer the baccalaureate, honoris causa, on Mary Bonauto. What I'd like to know is what parents, proudly assembled to witness Hamilton's commencement exercises, would make of Mary Bonauto's activities if they knew about them? And how about Hamilton's alumni: Would they be happy to see their alma mater honoring this radical activist? What about Hamilton's trustees, a group that is rapidly emerging as the dead-letter office of American higher education? Isn't anyone ever at home there?

What is it with Hamilton College, anyway? Are its leaders actually trying to make it look ridiculous? Or is the fact that Hamilton has become a recruitment poster for the dysfunctional American college the product of simple incompetence fueled by radical left-wing animus? I do not know the answers to these questions. It's a bit like Robert Frost's poem "Fire and Ice": Some say the place was ruined intentionally, some say it was stupidity goaded by radicalism. I hold with those who pick the latter. But either would suffice. You certainly would have to work a lot harder than most tenured professors are accustomed to working if you wanted to bring more shame and obloquy on an institution than Hamilton has had to bear in the last few months.

A brief refresher: In December, Hamilton invited Susan Rosenberg, late of the Weather Underground, to teach a month-long seminar as an "artist/activist-in-residence." As readers will recall, Ms. Rosenberg was catapulted to fame in 1981 when she and some fellow radicals held up a Brinks armored car near Nyack, N.Y. They murdered a Brinks guard and, in attempting their getaway, two police officers. Ms. Rosenberg was indicted for involvement in this crime but wasn't prosecuted because, in 1985, she was sentenced to 58 years for using false identification and possessing automatic weapons and 740 pounds of high explosives. Rosenberg had served 16 years when Bill Clinton, on his last day in office, commuted her sentence. Now she is trotting around the country denouncing the United States at a college campus near you.

But not at Hamilton. For when the college, which is just down the road from Nyack, announced the appointment--cleverly timing it to coincide with the announcement of their latest capital campaign--the roof caved in. Quite right, too. Why was a liberal arts college inviting a felon to teach? Why, for that matter, did Hamilton have an "artist/activist-in-residence" program to begin with? Do parents have to pay nearly $40,000 a year to turn their children into left-wing, America-hating activists? The outcry from the media, parents, and alumni eventually forced Rosenberg's withdrawal.

Then, in January, came the Ward Churchill affair. Everyone now knows about the faux-Indian tenured professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder who described the victims of September 11 as "little Eichmanns," i.e., Nazi bureaucrats. What better chap to invite to lecture at Hamilton College? The folks at Hamilton managed to create havoc at two institutions with that brainstorm. Boulder was in an uproar over the incident (the invitation is what brought to light his earlier essay). Even the governor of Colorado weighed in angrily. Churchill has yet to be relieved of his tenured position, but he has been removed as head of the "ethnic studies" department (how do you spell "bogus"?), and the president of his campus has had the grace to resign and slip away into obscurity.

Joan Hinde Stewart, the president of Hamilton, has not yet exhibited such grace. Nor have her lieutenants, dean of the faculty David C. Paris and Nancy Rabinowitz, a former teacher of Mary Bonauto and former head of the Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society and Culture, the left-wing organization that was responsible for inviting Rosenberg and Churchill to campus. The troika still presides at Hamilton, a sort of academic alternative to the Three Stooges: Rabinowitz to cook up the harebrained, college-blighting schemes; Paris to help her implement them; and Stewart to wring her hands and temporize when they explode in her face.

In a way, it is unfair to single out Hamilton College. In its addiction to leftist pieties, it is really no different from many, probably most, other institutions of higher education in this country. It has simply been unlucky in its public relations lately. One conservative student who was a member of Hamilton's Trustee Committee on Honorary Degrees last year told me that he was urged to avoid "contentious candidates." But at Hamilton, as elsewhere, contentious candidates come in two flavors. There are conservatives, who are "contentious" by definition and therefore unacceptable, and then there are radicals who have devoted themselves to the destruction of some aspect of American society, and who are therefore embraced as champions of "diversity" and freedom. It's a mug's game, but that, alas, is what has happened to academic life today. How long, Lord, how long?

Mr. Kimball is managing editor of The New Criterion. The latest of his books is The Rape of the Masters, about what contemporary academicians have done to art.