Right now, OU has to be hoping that the frat guys will be too embarrassed to sue. But slinking away would be a mistake. Better to be a First Amendment hero! So now the question is, how smart are OU frat guys? Or at least, how smart are their parents and lawyers?
Related: ACLU Now Admits OU’s SAE Expulsions Are Likely Unconstitutional. As they are. “I’m glad the organization is articulating a clearly pro-speech position on the expulsions. There is nothing contradictory about condemning the students for terribly racist statements while still defending their absolute right to express such sentiments.”
Nonsense. Free speech is only for speech that everyone likes!
MORE IGNORANCE OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT: The FAA Says You Can’t Post Drone Videos on YouTube. Government employees who don’t understand the Constitution should be fired. But they should probably also be tarred and feathered or something, as an example to the others.
HMM: If Jeffrey Epstein’s Non-Prosecution Agreement Is Overturned, Clinton Ties To Teen Sex Ring Could Be Exposed. “While Bill and Hillary Clinton may have cut off Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire convicted pedophile friend of Bill’s, Epstein’s chief procurer of teens for sex with Epstein and his A-list sex crime cronies, a woman named Ghislaine Maxwell, remains an intimate of the Clintons and is running a program funded by the Clinton Slush Fund a.k.a. The Clinton Foundation.”
Everyone who has been the victim of a breach [of] First Amendment protections like those frat brothers in Oklahoma is un-heroic, it least to contemporary observers. People who say nice things aren’t expelled, or evicted, or jailed, or beaten, or tortured, or killed — and by nice I mean conforming to the prejudices of majority. The free speech martyr is always despised by the majority because he says things or writes things or makes photographs of that which the majority finds objectionable. So when the government cracks down on Nazis like Lincoln Rockwell or pornographers like Larry Flynt we all tend to think “good, the bastard needs to be shut up since what he says is so horrible, so false, and so hurtful.”
But the bastards are heroes, and here’s why — we wouldn’t have a First Amendment except for the fact that back in the 1780’s not all Americans were approved of by the majority. Some were Catholics, some were Jews, and some Quakers… and some weren’t too happy with the break with England. These people were afraid that the new American nation would turn on them for being nonconformists, and would enacts restraining laws against their worship, schools, festivals, and observances. Some slaveholders feared the abolitionists. Some abolitionists feared the slaveholders. We must remember that the Constitution in it’s original form contained no restraints on legislative power that would prevent enactment of laws against the saying and hearing of Mass, for example. Under the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Catholics and Catholicism were banned absolutely. In 1788 Massachusetts was still overwhelmingly Calvinist, and in the 18th century Calvinist zeitgeist a Catholic was either an ignorant superstitious peasant, or an idolator in league with Anti-Christ, a least as bad a racist today.
Everybody who has an opinion and his ballsy enough to express that opinion is somebody’s worthless bastard who needs to shut the fuck up, get right with God, and dress like a human being fer chrissake. It was the nonconformist bastards of 1788 who insisted on free speech. Without them America could have wound up like any tin-plated dictatorship. Dictators always curb speech, and the reason they give is always “we gotta shut up the bastards!” The bastards are a minority, so the majority don’t complain too much, except when it too late as Bonhoeffer discovered to his sorrow.
If you only stand up for speech you approve of, you’re a hack. If you only stand up for speech that everyone approves of, you’re a coward.
(1) Yes. (2) Also, they’re afraid the SAE thing might hurt football recruiting. OU football players are heavily black, and matter more to the financial bottom line than fraternities, and they’re not taking it well.
UPDATE: From the comments: “Once the feds are through investigating small town PDs like Ferguson, maybe they’ll get around to investigating the ones supposedly under their own control – Quis custodiet ipsos custodes and all that?”
Here’s UT’s policy: “One’s own use of alcohol, drugs, or other substances does not diminish one’s responsibility to obtain consent from the other person. Moreover, another person’s use of alcohol, drugs, or other substances does not diminish one’s responsibility to obtain consent from that person.”
The problem with this is that they then start talking about victims and perpetrators. If both people are drunk, each is both a victim and a perpetrator; simply assuming that the male is the perpetrator and the female the victim is sexist — and, in itself, is sex discrimination in violation of Title IX. Indeed, even describing the policy to students in a way that suggests that males are the perpetrators in such circumstances is sex discrimination. And everything people say like that, in newspapers and elsewhere, will become part of the record in lawsuits filed by people like Ben Rose. So at least it’s good for lawyers.
I’m also disappointed to see a UT person citing the notion that only 1 to 2 percent of rape reports are false, when, as Bloomberg’s Megan McArdle says, “The 2 percent number is very bad and should never be cited.” Indeed, the article doesn’t even get that right — the 1 to 2 percent figure doesn’t come from the FBI, but from feminist writer Susan Brownmiller. The FBI number is 8 percent, and as McArdle notes, that’s generally regarded as too low. Some other studies give a number as high as 41 percent. This sort of recitation of bogus statistics may give rise to fears that the process is biased. It certainly would constitute evidence of bias in a lawsuit.
Meanwhile, the more articles like this that appear in student papers, the bigger enrollment problems colleges and universities will face. With people already writing about The End Of College, turning campuses into Brave New World without the sex is poor marketing. A better solution would be to treat rape charges as the serious crimes they are, and let law enforcement, not student disciplinary officials, deal with them. Creating a special, due-process-free disciplinary process for crimes that are portrayed as being committed solely by males is itself evidence of sex discrimination and a hostile education environment.
UPDATE: Of course, I could just be talking my book, as they say:
MAKEUP’S EFFECT ON FEMALE ATTRACTIVENESS: Overrated? “The take-home message here seems to be that, for better or worse, our attractiveness is mostly determined by our natural appearance, and wearing makeup will only have a small effect in comparison.”
One in four college women has been the victim of rape or attempted rape. One in four. I remember standing outside the dining hall in college, looking at a purple poster with this statistic written in bold letters. It didn’t seem right. If sexual assault was really so pervasive, it seemed strange that the intricate gossip networks hadn’t picked up more than one or two shadowy instances of rape. If I was really standing in the middle of an “epidemic,” a “crisis” — if 25 percent of my women friends were really being raped — wouldn’t I know it?
These posters were not presenting facts. They were advertising a mood. Preoccupied with issues like date rape and sexual harassment, campus feminists produce endless images of women as victims — women offended by a professor’s dirty joke, women pressured into sex by peers, women trying to say no but not managing to get it across.
This portrait of the delicate female bears a striking resemblance to that 50’s ideal my mother and other women of her generation fought so hard to leave behind. They didn’t like her passivity, her wide-eyed innocence. They didn’t like the fact that she was perpetually offended by sexual innuendo. They didn’t like her excessive need for protection. She represented personal, social and intellectual possibilities collapsed, and they worked and marched, shouted and wrote to make her irrelevant for their daughters. But here she is again, with her pure intentions and her wide eyes. Only this time it is the feminists themselves who are breathing new life into her.
Frankly, I’m beginning to wonder if women are too delicate to handle the strain of voting, the poor dears.
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