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发帖数: 29846 | 1 Powerful Left-Wing Lobbies Seek to Silence Dissent and Anonymous Speech on
Campus
Two weeks ago, 72 left-wing groups, including the Feminist Majority
Foundation, American Association of University Women, and Leadership
Conference on Civil and Human Rights, asked federal civil-rights officials
to crack down [1] on anonymous [2] politically-incorrect speech [3] on
campus, which they claim violates federal civil-rights laws such as Title IX
. They claim they are concerned about “harassment” on anonymous social
media applications like Yik Yak, as the Chronicle of Higher Education notes
[4] in the article “Women’s Groups Urge Colleges and Government to Rein in
Yik Yak.”
But their October 21 letter [5] to the Education Department’s Office for
Civil Rights makes clear that their real goal is to restrict free speech,
not just “harassment,” since the letter explicitly labels constitutionally
-protected speech as “race based harassment.” It seems their real goal is
to silence dissent on campus by eliminating students’ ability to express
their opinions anonymously. The ability to speak anonymously gives moderate
and conservative students a chance to speak without vilified or punished by
left-wing campus administrators or bullied by student government officials (
who sometimes defund campus newspapers for having the temerity to print a
moderate or conservative viewpoint about a racial or sexual issue).
As their letter puts it [5], “Anonymous race-based harassment through Yik
Yak is also pervasive on college campuses. At American University in
Washington, DC, for example, Yakkers posted successive invidious comments
targeting African-Americans, such as ‘Their entire culture just isn’t
conducive to a life of success. It just isn’t. The outfits. The attitudes.
The behavior.'” Regardless of whether this sentiment is racist, it
certainly is not “harassment.” Indeed, even black newspaper columnists and
entertainers regularly lament cultural impediments to success in the black
community. Moreover, there is no “racism” exception to the First Amendment
. In 1993, a federal appeals court cited the First Amendment to overturn [6
] a fraternity’s discipline for a racist, sexist “ugly woman” skit, in
Iota Xi Chapter of Sigma Chi Fraternity v. George Mason University. And
calling racist viewpoints “harassment” does not change this, because as
another federal appeals court explained in DeJohn v. Temple University (2008
), “there is no ‘harassment exception'” to free speech about racial and
sexual issues on campus.
Requiring colleges to punish what is perceived to be “race-based” speech
would endanger even viewpoints that are mainstream positions in society at
large, but are disapproved of by politically-correct college campus
administrators. Under campus hate speech and “harassment” codes, students
have been subjected [7] to campus disciplinary proceedings, in violation of
the First Amendment, merely for expressing commonplace opinions [8] about
sexual and racial issues, such as criticizing feminism or affirmative action
, or discussing homosexuality or the role of race in the criminal justice
system.
Wesleyan University in Connecticut provides a recent example of how even
mainstream conservative viewpoints are targeted for suppression on campus,
in a saga so extreme that it drew criticism from the generally liberal
Washington Post [9] columnist Catherine Rampell [10]:
“In September, sophomore Bryan Stascavage — a 30-year-old Iraq veteran and
self-described ‘moderate conservative’ — wrote a column for the Wesleyan
Argus. In it, he criticized the Black Lives Matter movement — not the
movement’s mission or motivations, but its tactics and messaging,
particularly those of its more anti-cop fringe elements.
“The essay was provocative, but it contained neither name-calling nor
racial stereotypes. It was no more radical than the conservative commentary
you might see on mainstream op-ed pages such as this one. That didn’t stop
all hell from breaking loose.
“Within 24 hours of publication, students were stealing and reportedly
destroying newspapers around campus. In a school cafe, a student screamed at
Stascavage through tears, declaring that he had ‘stripped all agency away
from her, made her feel like not a human anymore,’ Stascavage told me in a
phone interview. Over the following days, he said, others muttered ‘racist
’ under their breath as he passed by.
“The Argus’s editors published a groveling apology on the front page. They
said they’d ‘failed the community’ by publishing the op-ed without a
counterpoint and said it ‘twist(ed) facts.’ They promised to make the
paper ‘a safe space for the student of color community.’ This self-
flagellation proved insufficient; students circulated a petition to defund
the newspaper.”
The Wesleyan student government has now voted [11] to effectively cut the
newspaper’s funding.
In their October 21 letter, the left-wing groups essentially ask the
Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights to repeal the First
Amendment as to internet speech and anonymous speech, complaining that
colleges have cited “vague First Amendment concerns” in refusing to crack
down on such speech. (The Supreme Court ruled that anonymous speech is
generally protected by the First Amendment in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections
Commission (1995)).
As they note, the Office for Civil Rights has already pressured colleges [12
] to adopt what are effectively campus speech codes in its recent “Dear
Colleague” letters to the nation’s school officials, which label certain
kinds of speech as probative of racial or sexual harassment: “In its
October 2010 Dear Colleague Letter, OCR clarified that prohibited harassment
may take many forms, including … graphic and written statements, which
may include use of cell phones or the Internet … OCR should also make clear
that the First Amendment does not prevent schools from taking action” to
restrict such speech, whether it “occurs in-person or online.”
It asks OCR to force colleges to take actions such as investigating “all”
complaints of “online harassment,” whether or not the speaker is “
anonymous”; bringing “campus disciplinary proceedings against” such “
individuals”; blocking or “geo-fencing of anonymous social media
applications that are used to . . . harass students”; and “barring the use
of campus wi-fi to view or post to these applications.” Thus, it seeks to
ban entire applications from campus based on the speech of some of their
users, and to keep students from even seeing what is posted on them, keeping
them in the dark about their content. (The Supreme Court has described
such blanket bans as being as foolish and harmful as “burning the house to
roast the pig,” in its 1997 decision [13] striking down a ban on indecent
internet speech.)
But there is no “internet” exception to free speech about racial or sexual
issues (or a blanket “hostile environment” exception, for that matter).
That’s why the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a lawsuit based on
a “hostile environment” that it assumed was created by a white professor’
s anti-immigration emails. In that decision, Rodriguez v. Maricopa Community
College [14] (2010), it relied on the First Amendment to quash a racial
harassment suit against the professor for sending those emails, which a
college’s Hispanic faculty claimed created a hostile work environment in
violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and 42 U.S.C 1983.
Some of the letter’s demands are probably too extreme to be endorsed by the
Office for Civil Rights. But in the past, it has sometimes shown a
disregard for the First Amendment and limits on its statutory jurisdiction.
As I noted earlier in The Wall Street Journal [15], “the Education
Department, where I used to work,” is “pressuring colleges to adopt
unconstitutional speech codes in the name of fighting sexual harassment. It
has disregarded many court rulings in doing so.
“For example, the Education Department has wrongly ordered schools to
regulate off-campus speech and conduct. That contributed to the harassment
charges against Prof. Laura Kipnis, who was accused over a politically
incorrect essay she wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education and
statements she made on Twitter. Court rulings like Roe v. Saint Louis
University (2014) reject Title IX claims over off-campus conduct, but the
Education Department ignores them. It also ignores court rulings like Klein
v. Smith (1986) emphasizing that the First Amendment usually bars public
schools from restricting off-campus speech. For example, the Education
Department told schools to regulate comments ‘on the Internet’ in an
October 2010 letter. In 2014, it demanded that Harvard regulate off-campus
conduct more.”
The Office for Civil Rights should nevertheless keep in mind that it — and
individual OCR officials — can be sued for enforcing the civil-rights laws
in a way that violate the First Amendment. OCR’s demands under the civil-
rights laws were once held to have violated the First Amendment in Knights
of the Ku Klux Klan v. East Baton Rouge Parish School Board (1978). A
chapter of the Klan had sought to meet together during non-school hours in
an empty classroom, the way other groups were permitted to do by the school
district. But it was barred from doing so by the school district, acting
under pressure from the Office for Civil Rights, which argued that its
presence would be illegal racial discrimination. A federal appeals court
ruled that the school district and OCR had violated the Klan’s free-speech
rights, which could not be overridden by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act or
OCR’s requirements.
Similarly, another federal appeals court ruled that [16] individual federal
civil-rights officials could be sued for restricting speech in White v. Lee
(2000). That ruling emphasized that speech can’t be punished just because
it incites illegal discrimination. It also ruled that federal officials
could be sued for threatening citizens with civil fines for speaking out
against a minority housing project, even if the speech persuaded a city to
delay a housing project that would house members of a protected minority
group. That decision also indicated that the restrictions on speech found in
workplace racial or sexual harassment rules cannot be applied to society
generally under non-workplace discrimination laws.
Hans Bader is a senior attorney at the Competitive Enterprise Institute [17].
Source URL: http://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/hans-bader/powerful-left-wing-lobbies-seek-silence-dissent-and-anonymous-speech-campus | T*********I
发帖数: 10729 | 2 政治正确和AA（以及附带的什么大学，和选举中维持黑人绝对优势的gerrymander），
是美国彻底的耻辱。
完全颠覆了美国以前对人类的贡献。 |
|
