On 9 June 1954, the lawyer Joseph N. Welch stood up before Joseph McCarthy, the senator from Wisconsin who’d built a political career by denouncing real and imagined communists.

At that time, McCarthy was pursuing a young man for associating with the leftwing National Lawyers Guild.

Red-baiting ruined lives in the period the screenwriter Lillian Hellman dubbed “scoundrel time”. Those publicly smeared by McCarthy were subsequently ostracised. Many lost their jobs – and some went to jail.

That day, though, Welch lost his temper – and his famous outburst helped bring the ignoble era of McCarthyism to a close.

“Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator,” he snapped. “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

His comments come to mind with the news that Roz Ward, the academic playing a leading role in the Safe Schools anti-bullying program, has been suspended by La Trobe University.

For weeks now, a familiar claque of the professionally outraged has been demanding that Ward resign. For Ward, you see, is a socialist and her recent Facebook post calling the Australian flag “racist” provided a pretext for anti-Safe Schools campaigners to lose their collective minds.

“Marxist education adviser Roz Ward [has revealed] the true nature of the ‘Safe Schools’ program she co-founded,” thundered Miranda Devine. Kevin Donnelly denounced “a Trojan horse employed by Marxist and socialist-Left activists to force a radical lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex agenda on children and schools.” Federal education minister Simon Birmingham urged Ward to quit the national steering committee for Safe Schools Coalition Australia because “her extreme views are … anathema to the vast majority of Australians”; former Victorian premier, Jeff Kennett, declared that Ward’s “extreme political views” rendered her “ineligible to be involved in any program … in schools.”

And now La Trobe has suspended her.

Kennett and Birmingham and the other offence-mongers have taken particular umbrage at Ward’s lack of enthusiasm for the Australian flag – a hanging offence, La Trobe seems to think. Perhaps, then, the university administrators might explain precisely the degree of nationalist fervour required to gain entry to its community of scholars. Would Ward have been OK had she liked the flag a little? Does she need to wear it like a cape? Have the La Trobe honchos informed the uni’s Indigenous academics that drawing any connection between racism and Australian nationalism will see them out on their ears?

Tony Abbott once delivered a press conference behind a phalanx of 10 flags. Must all professors achieve such heroic levels of patriotism or could a mere five flagger manage to keep their job?

So many questions – and not just for La Trobe. Academics all over the country will be watching this case with horror.

Is the minister really arguing that, unless you have popular opinions, you can’t be employed in education?

Yes, Ward is a socialist. So was John Curtin and George Orwell and Helen Keller and Albert Einstein and Oscar Wilde. Would Kennett and Birmingham and the others engaged in this neo-McCarthyite push have excluded all of them? Or if it’s only particular types of socialists that are verboten, perhaps La Trobe can spell out exactly which doctrinal heresies it would like to ban.

Birmingham’s probably right to suggest that most Australians don’t agree with Roz Ward about Australian nationalism. But so what? Is the minister really arguing that, unless you have popular opinions, you can’t be employed in education? A curious notion of academic freedom – is that what La Trobe thinks, too? Where precisely will it draw the line? What if you vote for the Greens? What if you belong to a religious minority? Is there a list somewhere explaining exactly which ideas are and are not fit to be espoused on the Bundoora campus?

Back in the ‘50s, McCarthy and his ilk used accusations of communism not only to attack Marxists but also to intimidate and isolate trade unionists, civil rights campaigners, peace activists and anyone else they judged insufficiently American (as it happened, Tail Gunner Joe was keen on flags, too).

We’re seeing something similar here.

“We’re very concerned,” says Colin Long from the NTEU (the union for university staff), “that La Trobe University management seem to think that political views should be a criterion for employment.”

At the risk of stating the obvious, Ward’s Facebook posts bear no relationship to the merits or otherwise of Safe Schools, a program for which she’s not solely responsible, and one that, in any case, has been endorsed by the most qualified of educationalists. As Farrah Tomazin points out:

It’s a series of resources designed to give teachers practical ideas to help students with a specific set of challenges, and it was introduced in Victoria six years ago under the Brumby Labor government because schools actually asked for it.

That’s what makes this campaign so dishonest.

Almost without exception the people feigning horror at Ward’s views opposed Safe Schools long before they tracked down her Facebook page. They hate the program not because they object to Roz Ward but because they object to sexual diversity.

Back in 2004, Kevin “Trojan Horse” Donnelly, wrote a little book entitled Why Our Schools are Failing – a production commissioned by the Liberal party – in which he called gay, lesbian and transgender people “unnatural”. A year later, he attacked governments and teacher groups for supporting “the rights of gays, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people on the basis that there is nothing wrong with such lifestyles.”

In other words, Donnelly doesn’t want kids thinking it’s OK to be gay. But he knows he’ll get no traction for an explicitly anti-queer agenda, which is why he’s fulminating about the reds lurking under the kiddies’ beds.

No doubt the La Trobe bigwigs imagine they’re protecting their program by throwing Ward to the wolves. They think that, if they dump her, the controversy will disappear.

They’re delusional.

Devine and Bolt and the gerontocrats commenting for the Australian have tasted blood. There’s no way they’ll stop now. The Australian Christian Lobby and Cory Bernardi and the other social conservatives piling onto this ginned-up scandal see homosexuality as intrinsically sinful – the Australian Christian Lobby’s Lyle Shelton just compared Safe Schools to the Holocaust, for crying out loud – and they won’t be assuaged until the whole program’s cut.

In fact, one of the more striking aspects of the whole affair is the extent to which the publications polemicising against Ward are unashamedly promoting the schoolyard transphobia Safe Schools seeks to overcome.

Think of the Daily Telegraph illustrating Mark Latham’s hateful trolling by crudely photoshopping the heads of male politicians onto women’s bodies – precisely the kind of “aren’t trans people ridiculous!” gag you might expect to find in a playground. Or consider the Australian Spectator, which leads its latest edition with an article charmingly entitled”Attack of the Marxist Trannies”.

Have they no sense of decency? No, quite clearly they don’t – and they’ll take further encouragement by La Trobe’s disgraceful embrace of a McCarthyist campaign against an academic who’s done nothing wrong.