Free Speech on Campus: A Depressing Update

UGH.  

Thank goodness for FIRE and sensible campus defenders of free speech like Chicago.  Remember, kids: speech codes are unconstitutional!  I should report, too, that not every campus is a basket case: the student government at UC Santa Barbara just voted in favor of free speech ... though I have to shake my head that this is even an issue at all.

Nerd Journal: As the Spring Semester Ends, One Last Lesson

Class is in session one last time.  Repeat after me: You do not give up your civil liberties and individual rights when you set foot on campus.

Got that?  No?  Write it out 100 times by hand then.

As a fellow teacher and I were just saying, thank goodness for FIRE.  Keep fighting the good fight, my friends.  Support and defend academic freedom, uphold the civil liberties of students (and faculty!), and abolish all campus speech codes!  (Why?  Because they are evil, muzzling, and blatantly unconstitutional, that's why, and because - to put it baldly - you do not have a right to never be offended.) 

A Law Professor Considers the University of Oklahoma Speech Kerfuffle

The umpteenth reminder: free speech also protects speech that you don't like.

Here's a bit of it:

Though some ignorant people argue that "hate speech" is unprotected under the First Amendment, that is not the law and never has been. Nor should it be. The test of our commitment to free expression, after all, isn't our willingness to tolerate speech that everyone likes. If you only support free speech for ideas you agree with, you're a hack. If you only support free speech for ideas that everyone agrees with, you're a coward. 

Quote of the Day: Campus Speech Codes

Here's a piece of it:

The increased calls for sensitivity-based censorship represent the dark side of what are otherwise several positive developments for human civilization. ... I believe that we are not passing through some temporary phase in which an out-of-touch and hypersensitive elite attempts — and often fails — to impose its speech-restrictive norms on society. It’s worse than that: people all over the globe are coming to expect emotional and intellectual comfort as though it were a right. This is precisely what you would expect when you train a generation to believe that they have a right not to be offended. Eventually, they stop demanding freedom of speech and start demanding freedom from speech.

Campus speech codes are unconstitutional.  You don't give up your First Amendment rights once you step onto a campus, and you have no right to never be offended.

Oh, related link here.  Apparently it's just as bad  on the other side of the pond.

Nerd News: FIRE vs. Campus Speech Codes

You don't give up your First Amendment protections when you set foot on a campus. I hate speech codes ... and so does FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education).  It just announced these lawsuits yesterday:

“Unconstitutional campus speech codes have been a national scandal for decades. But today, 25 years after the first of the modern generation of speech codes was defeated in court, 58% of public campuses still hold onto shockingly illiberal codes,” said FIRE President Greg Lukianoff. “For 15 years, FIRE has fought for free speech on campus using public awareness as our main weapon, but more is needed. Today, we announce the launch of the Stand Up For Speech Litigation Project, an expansive new campaign to eliminate speech codes nationwide. We have already coordinated two lawsuits in the past nine months, and this morning we brought four more. The lawsuits will continue until campuses understand that time is finally up for unconstitutional speech codes in academia.”

Government Shutdown, Sunday Edition

Seriously?  Ugh.  

A Cartoonist Vs. the AP and James Rosen Scandal

Indeed.  Click to enlarge for more detail.

All the President's Men

Quote of the Day: Eric Holder's "Off the Record" Meeting

Here's an understatement:

"There is an uncomfortable irony in the fact that an attorney general investigating his policy for spying on the media is asking the media to keep his words secret."

Y'THINK?  Besides, when you find that media outlets from the New York Times to Fox News are refusing to go to your meeting, you're doing it wrong.  As for the few outlets who are going to the Holder meeting, they should probably leak everything immediately.  

Ask Not For Whom the IRS Trolls. It Trolls For Thee.

While everybody in a justified uproar about the IRS scandal (and the hearings this week only made its wretched "leadership" look worse), there's a new response/"defense" making the rounds on social media, and I just have to shake my head.  Some lefty people are actually defending the IRS.  They do this despite the fact that the IRS confessed to purposefully going after particular organizations based specifically on their political (and now apparently even religious) convictions.  And you don't think this sort of behavior is wrong?  Really?  Really?

Apparently these folks are fine with the capricious abuse of power as long as it's their team doing the abusing.  The overarching principle that "abuse of power is bad" seems to go right past them.  Partisan ideology makes people blind, blind, blind.  Guys, the government beast that today bites the neighbor whom you hate can tomorrow just as easily bite you.

I've give you this as the quote of the day:

The IRS targeting citizens for political reasons is not simply another Washington scandal. At issue is something that strikes at the very heart of who we are as a people, what we believe as Americans and what this country has always stood for. 

The First Amendment was written to protect many different types of expression. But the Founding Fathers' primary concern -- and a first principle for every generation of Americans that followed -- was the protection of political speech. Apparently, the IRS was even targeting people who criticized how the country was being run. 

Protecting citizens' right to speak out against their government has always been an integral part of what separates us from tyrannical regimes. What the IRS did is how the KGB used to target dissidents. It is how they deal with troublemakers in China. 

It is not how we treat American citizens. Our Constitution guarantees it. 

... This is not about Republican vs. Democrat or conservative vs. liberal. It is about arrogant and unrestrained government vs. the rule of law. 

Preach!

The Department of Education Fails Voltaire 101

Geez, I hate the DOE.  How many times do I have to say it?  YOU DON'T GIVE UP YOUR FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS WHEN YOU STEP ONTO CAMPUS.  Campus speech codes are evil, and this latest version even more evil than before.  Let the lawsuits begin!  

Religious Freedom Around the World: the 2013 Report

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom’s annual report is out (in PDF).   I'm just going to quote part of its assessment of China:

The Chinese government continues to perpetrate particularly severe violations of the freedom of thought, conscience, and religion or belief. Religious groups and individuals considered to threaten national security or social harmony, or whose practices are deemed beyond the vague legal definition of “normal religious activities,” are illegal and face severe restrictions, harassment, detention, imprisonment, and other abuses. Religious freedom conditions for Tibetan Buddhists and Uighur Muslims remain particularly acute, as the government broadened its efforts to discredit and imprison religious leaders, control the selection of clergy, ban certain religious gatherings, and control the distribution of religious literature by members of these groups. The government also detained over a thousand unregistered Protestants in the past year, closed “illegal” meeting points, and prohibited public worship activities. Unregistered Catholic clergy remain in detention or disappeared.

Nerd Analysis: "Shut up and play nice: How the Western world is limiting free speech"

Jonathan Turley, professor of public interest law at George Washington University, has a lengthy editorial on the subject that is more pressing than ever.  Here's a bit of his analysis:

The very right that laid the foundation for Western civilization is increasingly viewed as a nuisance, if not a threat. Whether speech is deemed inflammatory or hateful or discriminatory or simply false, society is denying speech rights in the name of tolerance, enforcing mutual respect through categorical censorship.

Whither Voltaire? As Turley notes elsewhere in his article, part of the whole point of free speech is the right to be offensive: "Of course, free speech is often precisely about pissing off other people — challenging social taboos or political values."  (You may recall that a while back I profiled a history professor who argued that renegades challenging social mores often resulted in more freedoms for everybody. You can read his new-ish book too.)

Satire Alert: "Imagine There's No YouTube"

I hate "Imagine," but the delightful Remy is so good that just this once I don't mind, and as usual he makes a point with humor.  Lyrics here.

 

Mark Steyn on the Mob and the First Amendment

Worth a look, as Steyn always is.

Quote of the Day: Jonah Goldberg on the First Amendment

Goldberg declares that some things are non-negotiable, though you wouldn't know it to look at our so-called governing "elite" these days:

There’s nothing wrong with exercising sound judgment, even caution, when it comes to offending another’s most cherished beliefs. But the First Amendment isn’t the problem here, the dysfunctions and inadequacies of the Arab and Muslim world are. 

James Burnham famously said that when there is no alternative there is no problem. If free speech in America causes a comparative handful of zealots to want to murder Americans, the correct response is to protect Americans from those zealots (something the Obama administration abjectly failed to do in Libya) and relentlessly seek the punishment of anyone who succeeds. Because, as far as America is concerned, there is no alternative to the First Amendment.

Free Speech and the Terrorists' Veto

Michael Totten comments.

Rant: I Hate Everything About "The Innocence Of Muslims" Except Its Right To Exist

Take a look at this passionate rant from one of the movie sites that I sometimes visit.  Language warning.  Oh, then contrast with this opposing take by the Los Angeles Times, the ending of which has the most clueless paragraph I've read in a while.

Living in Utter Defiance of Reality

I was going to write a full-blown post about this administration's foreign policy and public relations follies, but  the thought occurs to me that everything I want to say can be summed up in the blog post title.  

When Hillary Clinton insists that Benghazi residents took the late ambassador to the hospital as if performing a good deed instead of dragging his corpse in the street while snapping photos, when Susan Rice insists that the riots were spontaneous when the Libyan president says otherwise, when Jay Carney insists that the riots weren't about America but only one asinine video when even a cursory look at history would prove him wrong, when the president would rather go to Vegas and hang out with Beyonce and Jay-Z than go to security briefings and meet with Netanyahu, when the First Amendment seems to evaporate at a convenient moment, when the prospect of a nuclear Iran doesn't make you do anything other than pay lip service, and when Mitt Romney seems to be a bigger problem than the fact that abroad you have alienated your allies and inflamed your enemies while at home you have presided over 40+ months of 8% unemployment and $16 trillion national debt and unsustainable entitlements ... Well, you just might be living in utter defiance of reality.  It's not just denial.  It's the active, willful defiance of it.

(And, no, it's not raaaaaaaaaaaaacist to say so.)

Irony of Ironies: It's Constitution Day Today

Right on the heels of the Nakoula debacle!  Read the Constitution and the Bill of Rights beginning with the First Amendment.  Remember, as Franklin said, what we have is "a republic if you can keep it."  

Memes of Outrage

Yup, what happened at midnight in California looks just as bad now in the harsh light of day.  That image of  Nakoula Basseley Nakoula being hauled away should be the image that ends the career of the president who let it happen on his watch!  You call that defending the Constitution?  I mean, seriously.  The whole point of the First Amendment is protecting even the most objectionable and offensive of people.  Yes, dirtbags have rights too.  That's why America rocks.  Now, last I heard, making an idiotic low-budget Youtube video is not a crime.  Oh, but this is a video that the government happens not to like ...  WELL, IT'S STILL NOT A CRIME.

But, as the Insta-Prof has suggested that we all publicize the incident and our indignant disapproval, there is a new Internet meme that has sprung up overnight.  I give you one of my favorites as it modifies the famous phrase associated with Voltaire about disapproving of what you say, but ...

Fine print.

In the interest of fairness, a contrarian view.  The Insta-Prof (remember Reynolds 2016 with flamethrowers for embassy protection!) doesn't buy this, and I don't either.  That stupid video had been online since July 1.  It's a little too convenient to say, hey, on September 11 Embassy-Storming Week began, so a mere 4 days later when the bloody-minded mobs are howling about this video we'll haul Nakoula off in the middle of the night ... amid a blaze of media trucks for ... probation violations. 

UPDATE: People are meme-ing the hell out of this image.  Good.  Let this photo haunt the administration all the way to Election Day.