Facebook Censorship: Can’t Criticize Transgenderism

This speaks for itself as an example of how transgenderism has become an intolerant orthodoxy in large sectors of U.S. society.

Update

The above was posted on our Facebook timeline, and embedded here.

Facebook censored it on our timeline. So here is the post for all to see:

The Fake Attack on “Fake News”

From Frontpage Mag:

Remember when Hillary Clinton won a landslide victory? The fake news media which predicted it in order to depress pro-Trump voter turnout certainly does. And so they’re out to fight “fake news.”

By fake news, they don’t mean their own raging torrent of misinformation and lies.

The media has gone to war against Facebook. While various supporters have blamed Hillary’s loss on everything from the FBI to internalized misogyny, the media has decided that Facebook is to blame.

Why Facebook?

Cable news is dying. Newspapers struggle online and offline. The mainstream media’s profitability lives and dies by social media. But the essence of social media is that it allows communities to shape what they see. That’s a terrifying idea if you’re a media conglomerate that depends on its megaphone.

But it’s also scary if you’re a leftist running for office in a country that doesn’t agree with your views.

Obama blamed “messaging” for the election results. But messaging requires being able to reach people. And that means clearing competitive voices out of the social media space by banning conservatives.

The war on conservative media is being conducted under the guise of banishing “fake news” from Facebook. But the fake news devil is in the details. Fake news can mean satire sites like the Onion or the Daily Currant. It can mean foreign clickbait sites that invent fake news. But it can also mean sites from outside the mainstream media whose stories are contested by the left for partisan reason.

The war on fake news is a smoke screen for a campaign against conservative media. And it’s easy to see that it’s conservative sites that are the real target of the Facebook book burners.

Buzzfeed, which depends heavily on Facebook traffic, has fed the “fake news” hysteria. Its list of “fake news” sites includes “hyperpartisan” sites. Its story contrasting “legitimate” mainstream media outlets, a category that somehow includes the Huffington Post, with a variety of right-leaning sites is a major piece of supporting evidence used in the fake news crusade.

Considering BuzzFeed’s history of fake news stories that fit its political narrative, it has no credibility fact checking anyone else. Examinations of BuzzFeed’s own methodology for its fake news article tore it into tiny little shreds. Its claim that fake news outperformed real news turned out to be… fake.

But what’s more important is how quickly the goal posts have been moved from fake news to conservative news, from fraudulent sites to fighting “clickbait” or “hyperpartisan” sites. And it’s clear that these are largely a euphemism for sites on the right that are outperforming the media.

USA Today and the Los Angeles Times promoted a list of “fake news” sites that included a variety of mainstream conservative sites including RedState, IJR and the Blaze. BuzzFeed targeted RightWingNews.

Fake news, like fact checking, has very obviously become a euphemism for attacking the politics that the left disagrees with by dressing up partisan agendas in fake concerns about journalism and civic virtue.

This goes far beyond namecalling. The goal is to ban conservative sites from social media. Or at least to penalize them in ways that will make it difficult for them to compete with the mainstream media.

There are obvious ideological and financial motives behind this war on “fake news.” The financial motives are grossly blatant. The loudest media voices in this war, BuzzFeed, HuffPo and Vox, depend heavily on social media traffic for their own hyperpartisan factually challenged clickbait.

Read the entire article.

The Washington Examiner gave some examples of what the Buzzfeed “study” considered the top “real news” stories:

Here’s the top “Real News” stories: “Trump’s history of corruption is mind-boggling. So why is Clinton supposedly the corrupt one?” As the headline suggests, this is a liberal opinion piece, complaining that the media doesn’t report enough on Trump’s scandals.

No. 2 is “Stop Pretending You Don’t Know Why People Hate Hillary Clinton.” This is a rambling screed claiming that people only dislike Clinton because she is a woman.

The No. 3 “Real News” story is “Melania Trump’s Girl-on-Girl Photos From Racy Shoot Revealed,” published at the New York Post.

To be clear, the journalists gnashing their teeth about “Fake Election News” winning would have been less concerned if “Melania Trump’s Girl-on-Girl Photos” had received more clicks.

If this study shows something it’s that the biggest fake news stories get a ton of Facebook engagement — maybe more than the biggest real election stories. (I say “maybe,” because maybe there were stories with more engagement at places like AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, the Miami Herald, the Chicago Tribune, the Dallas Morning News, Yahoo News, Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Houston Chronicle, or any of the thousand other news sources not included in the BuzzFeed study.)

Three conclusions can be drawn from all this. First, liberals are seeking a rationalization for why their candidate lost. They cannot admit that Clinton was a terribly flawed candidate. They cannot admit that their snobbish elitism was recognized, and rejected, by voters. If this evil fake news could have been controlled, the obviously correct candidate would have won, they believe.

Second, the Mainstream Media, and liberals generally, long for the bygone days when a few gatekeepers decided what was news, and what was true, and how events should be understood. They hate having to complete with alternative conservative sources over these issues, and hate that ordinary citizens on social media can entirely undermine the mainstream narrative.

Finally, this is an example of the ugly authoritarianism of contemporary liberalism. Indeed, it is significant that liberals will not call themselves “liberals,” since they have abandoned, in huge numbers, the central doctrine of classical liberalism. As propounded by Jefferson: “we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”

Liberals increasing insist they need not tolerate error.  And they believe themselves authorized to decide what is in error.

Bias at Twitter

As reported by CNN: “Twitter suspends accounts of alt-right advocates.”

Of course, this is the same Twitter that allows #AssassinateTrump to trend. If you read messages with that hashtag on Twitter, the first ones you see berate Twitter for doing that. But if you keep going, you will see lots of messages from people really wanting Trump to be killed.

[Note:   Twitter login required to see posts.]

Another problem is the fact that once one starts banning “hate speech,” you face the need to define it. In the world of the politically correct, saying nasty things about Christians is fine, but saying critical things about Muslims is “hate speech.” It’s fine to say nasty things about whites and males, but racial minorities and women are protected.

It’s absurdly unlikely, in other words, that any neutral, fair ban on “hate speech” will ever be enforced.

Which is why racist speech (including speech that is really racist, and not just called “racist” by the politically correct) should be allowed, on Twitter and elsewhere. People who disagree with such speech have equal free speech rights to contest such speech. Indeed, social media like Twitter and Facebook make that very easy.

Update

There are #RapeMelania posts, and apparently they have been allowed to trend. It is the case, however, that #HillaryForPrison posts are allowed, they just apparently have not been allowed to trend.  There are no reports of accounts using #AssassinateTrump or #RapeMelania being deleted.

Where’s the Feminist Outrage as #RapeMelania Trends on Twitter? https://t.co/UkvR8l34Fr pic.twitter.com/fbHKwLJg8m

— chill (@chiIIinois) November 14, 2016

Science Guy: Punish Climate Skeptics

Global Warming Fascism: Use Government to Shut Up Skepticism

From the Wall Street Journal, an article about the bullying and intimidation deployed against any group that takes a less than alarmist view of global warming.

Punishing Climate-Change Skeptics

By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Andrew M. Grossman

Galileo Galilei was tried in 1633 for spreading the heretical view that the Earth orbits the sun, convicted by the Roman Catholic Inquisition, and remained under house arrest until his death. Today’s inquisitors seek their quarry’s imprisonment and financial ruin. As the scientific case for a climate-change catastrophe wanes, proponents of big-ticket climate policies are increasingly focused on punishing dissent from an asserted “consensus” view that the only way to address global warming is to restructure society—how it harnesses and uses energy. That we might muddle through a couple degrees’ of global warming over decades or even centuries, without any major disruption, is the new heresy and must be suppressed.

The Climate Inquisition began with Michael Mann’s 2012 lawsuit against critics of his “hockey stick” research—a holy text to climate alarmists. The suggestion that Prof. Mann’s famous diagram showing rapid recent warming was an artifact of his statistical methods, rather than an accurate representation of historical reality, was too much for the Penn State climatologist and his acolytes to bear.

Among their targets (and our client in his lawsuit) was the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank prominent for its skeptical viewpoint in climate-policy debates. Mr. Mann’s lawsuit seeks to put it, along with National Review magazine, out of business. Four years on, the courts are still pondering the First Amendment values at stake. In the meantime, the lawsuit has had its intended effect, fostering legal uncertainty that chills speech challenging the “consensus” view.

Mr. Mann’s lawsuit divided climate scientists—many of whom recognized that it threatened vital scientific debate—but the climate Inquisition was only getting started. The past year has witnessed even more heavy-handed attempts to enforce alarmist doctrine and stamp out dissent.

Assuming the mantle of Grand Inquisitor is Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.). Last spring he called on the Justice Department to bring charges against those behind a “coordinated strategy” to spread heterodox views on global warming, including the energy industry, trade associations, “conservative policy institutes” and scientists. Mr. Whitehouse, a former prosecutor, identified as a legal basis for charges that the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, the federal statute enacted to take down mafia organizations and drug cartels.

In September a group of 20 climate scientists wrote to President Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch encouraging them to heed Mr. Whitehouse and launch a RICO investigation targeting climate skeptics. This was necessary since, they claimed, America’s policy response to climate change was currently “insufficient,” because of dissenting views regarding the risks of climate change. Email correspondence subsequently obtained through public-records requests revealed that this letter was also coordinated by Mr. Whitehouse.

Reps. Ted Lieu (D., Calif.) and Mark DeSaulnier (D., Calif.) followed up with a formal request for the Justice Department to launch an investigation, specifically targeting Exxon Mobil for its funding of climate research and policy organizations skeptical of extreme warming claims. Attorney General Lynch announced in testimony this month that the matter had been referred to the FBI “to consider whether or not it meets the criteria for what we could take action on.” Similar investigations are already spearheaded by state attorneys general in California and New York.

Meanwhile, Mr. Whitehouse, joined by Sens. Edward Markey (D., Mass.) and Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.), sent letters to a hundred organizations—from private companies to policy institutes—demanding that they turn over information about funding and research relating to climate issues. In his response to the senators, Cato Institute President John Allison called the effort “an obvious attempt to chill research into and funding of public policy projects you don’t like.”

Intimidation is the point of these efforts. Individual scientists, think tanks and private businesses are no match for the vast powers that government officials determined to stifle dissent are able to wield. An onslaught of investigations—with the risk of lawsuits, prosecution and punishment—is more than most can afford to bear. As a practical reality, defending First Amendment rights in these circumstances requires the resources to take on the government and win—no matter the cost or how long it takes.

It also requires taking on the Climate Inquisition directly. Spurious government investigations, driven by the desire to suppress a particular viewpoint, constitute illegal retaliation against protected speech and, as such, can be checked by the courts, with money damages potentially available against the federal and state perpetrators. If anyone is going to be intimidated, it should be officials who are willing to abuse their powers to target speech with which they disagree.

That is why we are establishing the Free Speech in Science Project to defend the kind of open inquiry and debate that are central to scientific advancement and understanding. The project will fund legal advice and defense to those who need it, while executing an offense to turn the tables on abusive officials. Scientists, policy organizations and others should not have to fear that they will be the next victims of the Climate Inquisition—that they may face punishment and personal ruin for engaging in research and advocating their views.

The principle of the First Amendment, the Supreme Court recognized in Dennis v. United States (1951), is that “speech can rebut speech, propaganda will answer propaganda, free debate of ideas will result in the wisest governmental policies.” For that principle to prevail—in something less than the 350 years it took for the Catholic Church to acknowledge its mistake in persecuting Galileo—the inquisition of those breaking from the climate “consensus” must be stopped.

Wisconsin Citizen Action: Shut up Conservative Talk Radio

Just found this in our e-mail:

“Can someone win without talk radio? Yes, theoretically. Except no one has.” - Milwaukee talk radio host Charlie Sykes, NY Times, 4/4/16

John -- I’m not going to sugarcoat it: Right-wing talk radio distorted our political process once again on Tuesday.

Using our public airwaves for what amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars in free advertising, Charlie Sykes, Jerry Bader and the rest of the reactionary talk radio circus delivered another election - this time for one of the most unqualified and bigoted Supreme Court Justice in Wisconsin history.

This is why we’re starting the Radio-Active campaign, because it’s more urgent than ever we fight back against the right-wing radio machine. Make a generous donation today to help raise the final $5,000 needed to launch the Radio-Active campaign and begin to break the conservative radio monopoly in Wisconsin.

Each day, conservative radio hosts in Milwaukee, Green Bay, and other Wisconsin cities use unfettered access to the public airwaves to blanket our state with racist, hateful content designed to divide and conquer our state.

The conservative radio monopoly is responsible for splitting cities and suburbs, tilting public opinion to the far-right, and setting an extreme agenda at the Capitol.

Worse still, their programs use our airwaves as a get-out-the-vote machine for far-right candidates. Without the right-wing radio monopoly, there would be no Scott Walker or Rebecca Bradley!

We've remained silent for too long. Now we must fight back.

Our Radio-Active campaign will stop at nothing less than breaking the grip of the right-wing media monopoly in Wisconsin.

Radio-Active will (1) monitor talk radio, hold media corporations accountable for supporting an extreme political agenda, and force them to provide balance; and (2) explore the possibility of purchasing radio stations that will air progressive talk radio programming.

We can’t afford to avoid the elephant in the room in our elections any longer.

Are you ready to take back our airwaves and hold the right-wing extremists on talk radio accountable? Become radio-active with a donation today and help raise the final $5,000.

Thanks for joining the fight,

Robert Kraig
Executive Director
Citizen Action of Wisconsin

Interesting question here: Are the people at Citizen Action such yahoos that they actually believe their rhetoric about “right wing” and “reactionary” and “racist, hateful content” and “bigoted,” or are they cynical, assuming that their potential donors are yahoos?

How terrible that conservative talkers have “unfettered” access to an audience that voluntarily tunes in.  The last thing we would want is for speech to be unfettered!

Some of their proposed actions are reasonable enough.  If leftists can buy a radio station and compete in the free market of ideas, good for them.  Counter speech you don’t like with more speech.

Except that Air America tried left-leaning talk radio, and it didn’t work.

The idea of  “holding media corporations accountable” to “force” them to “provide balance” implies an ugly authoritarianism.  Are they planning to challenge the licenses of radio stations they think are not “balanced?”  Are they going to try and revive the Fairness Doctrine to force stations to have a liberal talker to match every conservative one?

Should  “community advisory boards” be required, and given the power to dictate what kind of programming serves “community interests?”

Liberals are always coming up with ways to silence the ideas they don’t like.

But attempts to use government power to silence unwanted ideas shows a nasty authoritarian streak among contemporary liberals.  They prefer to call themselves “progressives,” which may be appropriate, since they now have parted company with classical liberalism, which favored individual freedom, including especially freedom of expression.

And if “progress” can be achieved by an imposed orthodoxy, they are the folks to do it.

Conservative Campus Speaker Censored / Case 11205

We don’t actually know it’s case 11205, but you get the point. From the Alliance Defending Freedom:

LOS ANGELES – Alliance Defending Freedom sent a letter Monday on behalf of a student group to California State University, Los Angeles, for charging the group unconstitutional fees in order to exercise its freedom of speech. The university president responded immediately by cancelling the event, having “decided that it will be best” to include the speaker in a “more inclusive event” featuring “a group of speakers with differing viewpoints on diversity.” The student organization, Young Americans for Freedom, is now considering a lawsuit against the university.

University officials charged YAF $621.50 for security officers because it deemed an event that the group is sponsoring “controversial.” The university has broad guidelines for such a designation and leaves it to the whim of officials, a practice that the U.S. Supreme Court has found to be unconstitutional in other cases. After the university received the ADF letter explaining this, CSU–Los Angeles President William Covino sent an e-mail to the student group to inform them that its event has been cancelled.

“Public universities should encourage, not stifle, the free exchange of ideas,” said ADF Senior Counsel David Hacker. “YAF has every bit as much right to hold its event as any other student group does, and the university can’t stop that because it prefers to water down the speaker’s message with other viewpoints that officials find more palatable to their own political views. The courts have made it clear that university officials cannot deem an event ‘controversial’ and then weigh down students with burdensome fees to engage in constitutionally protected free speech just because some people consider it controversial, but it’s even worse to take that a step further and try to silence the speech altogether.”

YAF is a chapter affiliate of Young America’s Foundation and a registered student organization at the university. YAF followed the university’s policies and procedures for planning an event Thursday in the U-SU Theatre on campus with conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro. YAF has been promoting it through social media and fliers for several weeks.

In reaction, some university students and staff commented on the social media posts and called the YAF chapter “intolerant” and “racists.” In particular, University Associate Professor of Sociology Robert Weide called the YAF students “white supremacists” and invited the YAF students to fight him in the U-SU gym. On Feb. 18, the university told YAF that it must hire three security officers and one university police officer for the event at a cost of $621.50 because “Mr. Shapiro’s topics and views are controversial.” ADF attorneys pointed out in their letter that the U.S. Supreme Court has already invalidated that rationale and asked that the university “immediately rescind the security fees assessed to YAF for the February 25 event.”

In an e-mail to YAF late Monday, Covino wrote, “After careful consideration, I have decided that it will be best for our campus community if we reschedule Ben Shapiro’s appearance for a later date, so that we can arrange for him to appear as part of a group of speakers with differing viewpoints on diversity…. We will be happy to work with Mr. Shapiro to schedule the more inclusive event that I have in mind. I have informed the university staff involved in facilitating the February 25 event that it will be rescheduled and reconfigured for a later date.”

“The First Amendment does not require YAF to consolidate its viewpoint with others,” Hacker noted. “The number of events on university campuses with speakers who have different viewpoints from Mr. Shapiro’s and YAF’s are plentiful. No need or legitimate basis exists for cancelling YAF’s event.”

Demanding that a group pay for “security” when they bring a conservative speaker to campus is a common tactic used by university bureaucrats.  The University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee tried it when a speaker was invited to campus whom Palestinian students disliked.

This, of course, gives a “heckler’s veto” to the most intolerant groups on campus, those that will explicitly or implicitly threaten violence and disorder.

And of course, rewarding this kind of behavior results in more of it, as the intolerant campus left learns they can successfully shut up speech they don’t like.

Demanding “differing viewpoints” and an “inclusive event” are likewise merely ploys to burden the expression of speech of which the left doesn’t disapproves. It’s shame the YAF gave in on this. Often, conservative students are simply too nice.

That’s not to say that debates with diverse points of view are a bad idea. They are a very good idea, but the campus left doesn’t seem to understand that until somebody wants to bring a conservative to campus.

Update

The administration at CSU-LA backed down, and allowed the speech. But leftist protesters blocked the entrance to the venue, preventing some students from entering, and tried to disrupt the speech by setting off a fire alarm. Police had to escort Shapiro out to insure his safety.

Feminist Harpy Defends Censorship at Oxford Union

Of course, these sorts of attitudes are not limited to the U.K. This sort of attitude should remind one of some things that have happened at Marquette.


You can watch all the debaters, starting with the first, at this link.

[Update]

The speaker in this video, one Kate Brooks, has claimed that these comments don’t represent her real views. You can decide. We have to note that Brook’s expressed views are highly congruent with common politically correct attitudes in academia.

Kirsten Powers on “The Silencing”

More Feminist Fascism in Academia: Ban Debate on Abortion

From the (liberal) Daily Beast: a story about how feminists at Oxford University got a debate on abortion shut down claiming that the two debaters (men) had no right to debate the issue.

Two male journalists, one conservative and one contrarian, were to debate abortion at Oxford University earlier this week. The event was sponsored by a student pro-life group and had all the ingredients to provoke an impassioned campus protest: two men, both right-leaning, debating an issue not often debated in England. And what do they know about terminating a pregnancy anyway?

It’s a fair question, one that could have been put to either journalist in a spirited debate (the very thing we expect to happen within the walls of a university). Or better yet, instead of wasting an evening listening to two men do battle over who controls a woman’s uterus, the aggrieved, pro-choice student could have simply skipped the event altogether.

But for those who were offended that someone with a penis might discuss abortion at all, opting to skip the event wasn’t enough. After the student union Women’s Campaign (WomCam) urged the Oxford Students of Life to cancel the event and demanded an apology for attempting to stage the debate, the university called it off entirely, a move critics slammed as a grave restriction of free speech.

After the event was canceled, in a spasm of alarming anti-intellectualism and illiberalism, Niamh McIntyre, a female student at Oxford, wrote in The Independent, “The idea that in a free society absolutely everything should be open to debate has a detrimental effect on marginalized groups.”

She insisted that she “did not stifle free speech” in calling for the event’s cancellation. (Only school administrators have the power to enact censorship, after all.) “As a student, I asserted that [the debate] would make me feel threatened in my own university; as a woman, I objected to men telling me what I should be allowed to do with my own body.”

Of course, a segregationist apartment owner who does not want to rent to blacks could ask “who are you folks to tell me what I can do with my property?” And a gun owner could ask “who are you liberals to tell me that I can’t own a gun?”

It’s safe to say that, in the United Kingdom especially (where only seven percent want a total ban on abortion), most women object to men telling them how the law should govern their bodies, particularly when it comes to reproductive rights. But that doesn’t mean men, whether or not their ideas are “offensive” or ill-informed, should be denied the right to argue their case.

According to McIntyre, “Debating abortion as if it’s a topic to be mulled over and hypothesized on ignores the fact that this is not an abstract, academic issue.” But her real argument is that only those directly affected by abortion (women) can participate in an ethical debate on the subject. (While we’re at it, are there topics that only men can debate?) And McIntyre’s argument could be made by both sides—or anyone so sure of their position that they no longer believe it a subject to be “mulled over or hypothesized on.”

The Oxford abortion controversy is the latest example of an increasingly common instinct among certain feminists to argue that certain subjects and certain arguments are either off limits or simply not up for debate.

Take feminist writer Jessica Valenti. Responding to a Sunday New York Times column arguing that new affirmative consent laws are too broad and difficult to enforce, Valenti denounced its author, Yale Law School professor Jed Rubenfeld, as a “rape apologist.”

The core of Rubenfeld’s piece—that universities should not be responsible for adjudicating rape charges and that “yes mean yes” policies are deficient—has been cogently argued by legal experts and social scientists, and in turn provoked many cogent counter-arguments.

Sure, Rubenfeld makes some controversial points, like his claim that the “redefinition of consent… encourages people to think of themselves as sexual assault victims when there was no assault.” But controversial or not, nowhere in his piece does he “apologize” for rapists or excuse the crime of sexual assault. To accuse him of doing so is certainly an effective way to end a conversation. After all, what reasonable person would engage in argument with someone who is apologizing for rapists?

Like McIntyre, Valenti argues that “the worst offense is Rubenfeld’s apparent belief that there is a ‘debate’ to be had as if there are two equal sides, both with reasonable and legitimate points.” But worse is Valenti’s suggestion that her views—and those who agree with her—are the only reasonable and legitimate ones.

Predictably, Rubenfeld’s op-ed provoked backlash at Yale too. Some 75 students signed a lengthy letter condemning his “overly narrow view of the purpose of processes that allow survivors to report sexual misconduct and seek support on college campuses.”

The letter gave the impression that Rubenfeld had no support at Yale, but some students have quietly taken his side. “There actually are a large number of students who agree with him but are not at all comfortable coming forward in his defense,” a female law student at Yale who wished to remain anonymous told the Daily Beast. “I think that speaks to a lack of intellectual diversity in the conversation.”

This is a terribly revealing statement. Feminists have managed to exploit the “spiral of silence” to cow dissenting views. Of course, when dissenting views are voiced, it is necessary to move quickly to attack and vilify those who voice them, else the process breaks down, and people begin to feel free to dissent. This, in fact, is what we experienced when we called out a Philosophy instructor who said that gay marriage could not be discussed in her class since any gay students would be offended by any opposition to the policy.

“There is a baseline agreement when it comes to campus rape: the current system is failing these students,” she added. “People who don’t agree on a particular policy to address the campus rape crisis are not rape apologists.”

But lately many feminists seem more focused on setting “acceptable” conditions and standards of debate than on taking political action to combat sexism and sexual assault.

Nobody who has spent any time in academia will find this unusual.  The campus left simply does not accept that people who disagree with them have a right to speak.

This should sound familiar at Marquette. Not only did the aforementioned instructor in the Philosophy Department explain that gay marriage could not be discussed in class, another Philosophy graduate student asserted that opposition to gay marriage would constitute “violence” against gays.

The claim that somehow men are not allowed to debate abortion is essentially dishonest.  Feminists would never admit that women should be excluded from any policy debate.  What the feminists who shut down the Oxford debate objected to was merely the expression of ideas they disliked.

When women with whom the feminists disagree speak up, they are routinely demeaned and derided.

The simple fact is that feminism is not a women’s movement at all.  It’s a leftist movement exploiting the (sometimes real, sometimes imagined) victimization of women to achieve leftist goals.  The phrase “women’s movement” is in fact simply a lie.  The feminist banshees are useful as shock troops for the left, but they represent leftists, not women.

Obama Administration Mandates Campus Speech Censorship: More

We recently reported on an initiative by the Obama Departments of Justice and Education to require colleges to impose speech codes on campus speech that is in any way “sexual” or references gender.

Basically, it defined as “sexual harassment” any speech that some person on campus finds “offensive.” Established law dictates that speech, to be considered “sexual harassment,” must be offensive to a “reasonable person of the same gender in the same situation.” The new definition means that anything that somebody takes offense at has to be considered “sexual harassment” notwithstanding that no reasonable person would consider it such.

The Federal government has tried to defend this policy, and it doing so has tripped all over itself.

In a form letter sent to people to write the Office for Civil Rights, the claim is made that:

Furthermore, as we have said in the past, OCR’s regulations and policies do not require or prescribe speech, conduct or harassment codes that impair the exercise of rights protected under the First Amendment.

Then the letter tries to walk back the mandate, by explaining that:

Consistent with OCR’s previous, well-established guidance, the May 9 letter explains that “sexual harassment” is unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature but that sexual harassment is not prohibited by Title IX unless it creates a “hostile environment” — that is, unless the harassment is sufficiently severe, pervasive, or persistent such that it denies or limits the student’s ability to participate in or benefit from the school’s program.

Note that “conduct” includes “verbal conduct” (speech).

And of course, what constitutes a “hostile environment” is entirely a matter of a student’s subjective response to speech he or she does not like.

Back in December, 2011, we were charged with “sexual harassment” by some prissy little feminist in our introductory American Government class because we debunked bogus rape statistics that feminist professors and activists are always touting.

She apparently felt the “environment” was “hostile” because she heard views expressed that were out of sync with her feminist worldview.

The explanation of the policy by the Office for Civil Rights actually makes clear that purely subjective offense is something that universities ought to punish:

Students will be allowed to bring complaints when they have been subjected to unwelcome sexual conduct, and the University will evaluate whether that harassment has created a hostile environment. Making this determination requires, as it has in the past, the University to examine both whether the conduct is objectively offensive and its subjective impact on an individual.

So the “subjective impact” on the individual is sufficient for a finding of “sexual harassment.” Thus students who are intolerant of speech with which they disagree, and feel the speech is “hostile” have a right to have the university punish the speaker.

Marquette’s Non-Response

We queried Chris Miller, Vice President for Student Affairs, about this. He is out of the country, and gave us only a brief reply:

You are correct; we have no formal correspondence on it yet however I am in discussion with General Counsel on the matter. Let us try to connect upon my return.

It would be nice to believe that Marquette (and lots of other universities) would challenge this is court. There is not a snowball’s chance in hell of that happening.

In the first place, there are a large number of administrators (largely in offices that have “diversity” in their names) and quite a large number of faculty who very much like the idea of silencing people who say politically incorrect things about sex and gender. To come out against these rules would inflame them, and start them declaring that Marquette is “soft on sexual harassment.”

Further, as the current scandals surrounding the IRS show, Federal bureaucrats (and especially the “civil rights” enforcers) are liberal, capable of being very vindictive, and capable of causing huge trouble for anybody whom they dislike.

So these rules (like the absurd “Dear Colleague” letter about sexual assault) will probably remain in place, at least until they victimize some student, faculty member or staff member who is defiant enough to challenge them in court.

It’s important to remember that these rules will never be enforced in a neutral and consistent way. They will only be used to punish speech offensive to the politically correct activists who dominate most college campuses.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education notes, for example, that “The Vagina Monologues” could be outlawed for its lewd sexual content. That will never happen. “The Vagina Monologues” is an expression of politically correct feminism, and the socially conservative students who might object quickly learn that, on a modern college campus, they are to shut up and take what is imposed on them.

Likewise, we are very unlikely to ever be harmed by this rule, because (as Provost John Pauly learned the hard way) we can’t be harassed or bullied into silence.

A more likely outcome is that students will learn that any statements or expressions of opinion to which the campus feminists or the campus gay lobby object are voiced only at great personal risk.

And that, of course, would create the exact kind of campus that liberals and leftists want.

Obama Administration Mandates Campus Speech Censorship

From the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education:

WASHINGTON, May 10, 2013—In a shocking affront to the United States Constitution, the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education have joined together to mandate that virtually every college and university in the United States establish unconstitutional speech codes that violate the First Amendment and decades of legal precedent.

“I am appalled by this attack on free speech on campus from our own government,” said Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which has been leading the fight against unconstitutional speech codes on America’s college campuses since its founding in 1999. “In 2011, the Department of Education took a hatchet to due process protections for students accused of sexual misconduct. Now the Department of Education has enlisted the help of the Department of Justice to mandate campus speech codes so broad that virtually every student will regularly violate them. The DOE and DOJ are ignoring decades of legal decisions, the Constitution, and common sense, and it is time for colleges and the public to push back.”

In a letter sent yesterday to the University of Montana that explicitly states that it is intended as “a blueprint for colleges and universities throughout the country,” the Departments of Justice and Education have mandated a breathtakingly broad definition of sexual harassment that makes virtually every student in the United States a harasser while ignoring the First Amendment. The mandate applies to every college receiving federal funding—virtually every American institution of higher education nationwide, public or private.

The letter states that “sexual harassment should be more broadly defined as ‘any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature’” including “verbal conduct” (that is, speech). It then explicitly states that allegedly harassing expression need not even be offensive to an “objectively reasonable person of the same gender in the same situation” — if the listener takes offense to sexually related speech for any reason, no matter how irrationally or unreasonably, the speaker may be punished.

This result directly contradicts previous Department of Education guidance on sexual harassment. In 2003, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) stated that harassment “must include something beyond the mere expression of views, words, symbols or thoughts that some person finds offensive.” Further, the letter made clear that “OCR’s standards require that the conduct be evaluated from the perspective of a reasonable person in the alleged victim’s position, considering all the circumstances, including the alleged victim’s age.”

Among the forms of expression now punishable on America’s campuses by order of the federal government are:

• Any expression related to sexual topics that offends any person. This leaves a wide range of expressive activity—a campus performance of “The Vagina Monologues,” a presentation on safe sex practices, a debate about sexual morality, a discussion of gay marriage, or a classroom lecture on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita — subject to discipline.
• Any sexually themed joke overheard by any person who finds that joke offensive for any reason.
• Any request for dates or any flirtation that is not welcomed by the recipient of such a request or flirtation.

There is likely no student on any campus anywhere who is not guilty of at least one of these “offenses.” Any attempt to enforce this rule evenhandedly and comprehensively will be impossible.

That, of course, is the main point. When a vast array of speech is illegal, and only a small proportion of potentially “offensive” speech is punished, what will be punished is unpopular speech.

Thus, “The Vagina Monologues” is absolutely safe. Discussion of “safe sex” practices will always be protected. But a Christian ethical critique of homosexual sex will be punished. Criticism of feminism will be punished. Politically incorrect speech will be punished, but politically correct speech, no matter how objectively offensive, will be allowed.

“The federal government has put colleges and universities in an impossible position with this mandate,” said Lukianoff. “With this unwise and unconstitutional decision, the DOJ and DOE have doomed American campuses to years of confusion and expensive lawsuits, while students’ fundamental rights twist in the wind.”

“The Departments of Education and Justice are out of control,” continued Lukianoff. “Banning everyday speech on campus? Eliminating fundamental due process protections? Ignoring its own previous statements? They even misquoted the Supreme Court. This cannot be allowed to continue. FIRE will use all of its resources to oppose this menace to our constitutional freedoms and to free speech and academic freedom on campus.”

It remains to be seen, of course, whether this mandate will survive a court challenge. If federal judges hue to precedent, it certainly will not.

But it is questionable how much longer the federal judiciary will protect free speech when liberal elites are more and more wanting speech they dislike censored.

Yahoo Professor Hates F-word, But Only if Directed at Obama

Warning: Raw Language

From the Daily Caller:

Insulting the president and other government officials is practically a national pastime in the United States. This is a testament to the freedom of our society; in some parts of the world, insulting those who govern earns you swift punishment, or at least official censorship. That isn’t the case in America — unless you live on a college campus.

Students at Sam Houston State University (SHSU) in Texas found this out the hard way yesterday when they erected a “free speech wall” — a recently popular way for students to highlight the importance of free speech in which students put up a freestanding wall covered in paper, upon which anyone can write anything they want. Students jumped on the chance to participate. To cite a few examples: “Don’t hate against Gays . . .,” “If you make less than $200,000 Republicans don’t care about you,” “Life’s not a bitch, Life is a beautiful woman . . .,” “Han Solo Shot First,” “My boyfriend is a liar!,” “Legalize Weed!!!,” and “NAZI PUNKS FUCK OFF!!!”

But just hours in, the free speech wall was vandalized by a professor — yes, a professor! — who was offended that someone had written “FUCK OBAMA” on the free speech wall. Students being students, the “F-word” was written on the wall many times about many different topics, but apparently the only expletive that offended this professor enough to take action was the one referring to President Obama.

The professor, whom students identified as Joe Kirk, demanded that the student groups sponsoring the wall — including Republicans, Democrats, libertarians and socialists — cover up only the Obama statement. They refused. He then told them that he would come back with a box cutter and cut it out of the wall himself, which he then did. You can see the before and after pictures at thefire.org.

Shocked that a professor would do this, the student organizers got in touch with the campus police. When the police arrived, they interviewed the students and the vandalizing professor. Then came the surprise: The police told the students that since Prof. Kirk was offended by some profanity on the wall, the students were engaging in “disorderly conduct,” a misdemeanor, and had to cover up all the swear words on the wall or take it down. Realizing that this would make a mockery out of the purpose of a free speech wall, the students simply disassembled the wall. Thus ended SHSU’s several hour-long experiment with free speech.

. . . the police, by threatening to charge the students with disorderly conduct rather than Prof. Kirk with vandalism, have established a “heckler’s veto” on SHSU’s campus. Institutions grant a “heckler’s veto” over expression when they allow the reactions of those who hear or see the expression to govern what might be said, creating an incentive for people to act disruptively or violently when confronted with speech they don’t like in the expectation that the police will shut it down. That’s precisely what happened in this case: Prof. Kirk’s destructive vandalism and claims of offense led the police to silence the expression of every student who wrote on the Free Speech Wall.

Of course, trying to use a “heckler’s veto” is a standard tactic of the campus left. Threaten disorder, and way too many college administrations will shut up the speech the left dislikes, rather than clamp down on the disruptors.

It will be interesting to see whether Kirk is subjected to any kind of punishment. We doubt it will happen, since most college administrators (and the loud leftist lobby on most campuses) see nothing wrong with shutting up speech.

Just how many Marquette professors would do this? Very few, if any.

How many Marquette professors would defend what Kirk did, and insist that the student didn’t really have the right to make a vulgar comment on Obama? Quite a lot.

What Books Would People Like to Ban?

Google Blocking Recommendations For “Islam Is”

From an atheist website:

Why is Google Blocking “Islam Is” Search Recommendations?

Notice when you start typing in the Google search field that it shows recommendations below the field? The recommendations are based on popular searches and a rather nifty algorithm that tries to determine what it is you are searching for.

But Google is intentionally blocking these recommendations for “Islam is…”

Try it for yourself. First, establish exactly what Google should be doing.

In the search field type “Christianity is” and you will see recommendations of “bullsh*t, not a religion, a lie, false, a cult, wrong, fake, dying, Jewish, and not a religion t-shirt.”

In the search field type “Hinduism is” and you will see recommendations of “monotheistic, false, polytheistic, the majority religion of, the oldest religion, not a religion, fake, most commonly found, characterized by, and wrong.”

In the search field type “Buddhism is” and you will see recommendations of “not a religion, wrong, not what you think, bullsh*t, polytheistic, a religion, false, based on what concepts, the best religion, and atheism.”

In the search field type “Judaism is” and you will see recommendations of “false, not a race, not a religion, a race, a religion of the book, not Jewish, a gutter religion, monotheistic, a cult, and a religion.”

Try typing “Atheism is” and you will see recommendations of “a religion, dead, not a religion, wrong, the new fundamentalism, growing, a non-prophet organization, so senseless, illogical, a religion supreme court.” Clearly they are not holding back on the Atheists.

Now, let’s try Islam. Type in “Islam is” and you will see. . .

Absolutely nothing. That’s correct. Google makes no recommendations based on searches of “Islam Is.”

Why is Google blocking search recommendations for “Islam is?”

So why is Google blocking the search recommendations? Are they afraid of offending Muslims who will likely retaliate against Google? Or is it as one person suggested on Facebook, an attempt by Google to simply ignore Islam?

There is an image of the results described in the blog entry here.

We just tried the search for “Islam is,” and sure enough, no recommendations are shown.

Google won its top position among search engines fair and square, but monopolies, especially information monopolies, are a dangerous thing.

[Update]

Our query to Google about this produced the following response from Nate Tyler, one of their PR people:

Thanks so much for the inquiry. This is an issue we take very seriously and, like you, when we saw the reports this week we looked into the issue and discovered that it is indeed a bug and we’re working to fix it as quickly as we can.

Hope this helps.

United Church of Christ: Stifle “Hate Speech”

UCC supposedly stands for “United Church of Christ,” but the old jibe is that it really stands for “Unitarians Considering Christ.” A very liberal denomination, its ruling elites (and to a considerable extent, the members who haven’t yet left) use Christian rhetoric, but they won’t assert anything that rankles the secular politically correct sensibility -- opposing abortion or gay marriage, for example.

But they do oppose “hate speech.”

And their definition of “hate speech” is terribly vague and broad. For example:

Hate speech takes various forms, from words inciting violence, to those creating a climate of hate towards vulnerable groups. Hate speech has one common outcome: it creates an environment of hate and prejudice that legitimizes violence against its targets.

The presence of hate speech so widely in media creates a climate that makes it impossible to have reasonable policy discussions on issues like immigration reform, and cultivates a climate that condones violence against targeted groups.

Categories of hate speech:

• False Facts consist of incorrect, exaggerated, or de-contextualized facts.
• Flawed Argumentation is rooted in hidden assumptions, guilt by association, and appeal to fear.
• Divisive Language creates and/or encourages an “us vs. them” mentality. Hard times often incite blaming “others” as the source of trouble. Catholics, Jews, and African Americans have been routinely targets as scapegoats for those wishing to further their own agendas.
• Dehumanizing Metaphors evoke messages relating to warfare, heroism, disease, and biblical characters.

Of course, what are “false facts” is often a matter of opinion. And so is the proper “context.” The last thing governent should do is decide that “facts” are allowed to be broadcast.

And of course, “divisive language” aimed at conservative Christians, or white males, or the military, or insurance companies is apparently fine.

The statement makes it entirely clear that it’s only “vulnerable groups” that get protection.

The statement is addressed to the Federal Communications Commission.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration released a report in 1993 on The Role of Telecommunications in Hate Crimes. Members of the So We Might See Coalition are encouraging them to update this report.

The National Hispanic Media Coalition has filed a Petition for Inquiry in the Matter of Hate Speech in the Media at the Federal Communications Commission. Members of the So We Might See Coalition support this petition.

Then we get a really Orwellian formulation:

The First Amendment does protect even the most vile speech. The government, however, can play a role in compiling statistics and adopting rules that will help members of the public form their own opinions and hold broadcasters and other media outlets accountable for purveying this speech.

So, they are against censorship but in favor of “holding accountable” broadcast outlets that allow “hate speech.”

This is what happens when a Christian denomination gets taken over by a secular clerical elite. While people in the pews drift away, they engage in a series of moralistic crusades.

Using the United Nations to Censor Speech

From Maclean’s:

A coalition of Islamic states is using the United Nations to enact international “anti-defamation” rules

Pakistan and the other nations that have banded together in the Organization of the Islamic Conference have been leading a remarkably successful campaign through the United Nations to enshrine in international law prohibitions against “defamation of religions,” particularly Islam. Their aim is to empower governments around the world to punish anyone who commits the “heinous act” of defaming Islam. Critics say it is an attempt to globalize laws against blasphemy that exist in some Muslim countries — and that the movement has already succeeded in suppressing open discussion in international forums of issues such as female genital mutilation, honour killings and gay rights.

It might seem that the right to defame a religion is not one that’s important to a civilized society, so who not prohibit defamation?

The trend has rights advocates worried for numerous reasons, beginning with the language used. If the notion of “defaming” a religion sounds a little unfamiliar, that’s because it is a major departure from the traditional understanding of what defamation means. Defamation laws traditionally protect individual people from being materially harmed by the dissemination of falsehoods. But “defamation of religions” is not about protecting individual believers from damage to their reputations caused by false statements — but rather about protecting a religion, or some interpretation of it, or the feelings of the followers. While a traditional defence in a defamation lawsuit is that the accused was merely telling the truth, religions by definition present competing claims on the truth, and one person’s religious truth is easily another’s apostasy. “Truth” is no defence in such cases. The subjective perception of insult is what matters, and what puts the whole approach on a collision course with the human rights regime — especially in countries with an official state religion.

In a written brief [it was noted] that the resolutions seek to mimic the kinds of anti-blasphemy laws that exist in countries such as Pakistan. The UN resolutions “operate as international anti-blasphemy laws and provide international cover for domestic anti-blasphemy laws, which in practice empower ruling majorities against weak minorities and dissenters,” her brief states. Pakistan’s penal code includes a section that states that defiling Islam or its prophets is deserving of the death penalty; that defiling, damaging or desecrating the Quran will be punished with life imprisonment; and insulting another’s religious feelings can be punished with 10 years in prison. A 2006 report from the U.S. State Department on international religious freedom stated that such anti-blasphemy laws “are often used to intimidate reform-minded Muslims, sectarian opponents, and religious minorities, or to settle personal scores.” According to Amnesty International, Younis Masih, a Christian, was sentenced to death in 2007 for allegedly making derogatory remarks about the Prophet Muhammad. In Egypt, a professor at Cairo University was declared an “apostate” in 1995 for teaching his students to read parts of the Quran metaphorically, and was ordered to divorce his Muslim wife.

The fact that the resolutions keep passing, and that UN officials now monitor countries’ compliance, could help the concept of “defamation of religions” become an international legal norm, said Livingstone, noting that when the International Court of Justice at The Hague decides what rises to the level of an “international customary law,” it looks not to unanimity among countries but to “general adherence.” “That’s why these UN resolutions are so troubling,” she said. “They’ve been passed for 10 years.”

We don’t like such laws in any way way whatsoever, but we particularly don’t like the fact that such notions as “defaming a religion” will never be enforced in an even-handed way.

We can’t imagine anti-Christian bigots like Richard Dawkins or Christian-hating comics like Bill Maher ever being prosecuted. In reality, it’s only politically correct victim groups that get any protection.

There would be one huge irony if a prohibition against “defaming” Islam became law: the gay lobby, which itself often has the right to shut up speech hostile to homosexual acts, would find attacks on how Islam views homosexuality to be verboten.

A gay/Islamic war over “hate speech” would be an hilarious spectacle, but we would prefer simple free speech.

Wesley Clark: Pull Limbaugh From Armed Forces Radio

Eminent Domain is back!

And it has a post about a particularly stupid idea from a former American General.

Is it just me or is everyone currently hellbent on shutting everyone else up?

First General Wesley Clark wants to get Rush Limbaugh pulled from Armed Forces Radio over the “phony soldiers” imbroglio. Check out the video in the link. He thinks it’s a good idea for Congress to step in, make judgment calls about the “propriety” of discourse on public broadcasts, and yank Rush. Tucker Carlson points out that the same standard won’t be applied to PBS and NPR, entities that routinely broadcast opinions (opinions that many people disagree with or find downright offensive). Clark claims that the standards would be applied consistently. Clark fails to understand that he’s calling for judgment calls that are subjective in nature. The majority in Congress (which, I should remind the Democrats, does change over time) will have free reign to pull commentators from public broadcasts just because they disagree with the propriety of the content. This is just screaming to be abused.

In the video clip, Clark even goes as far to say that political discourse should be “rated.” “I’d like to see A-rated, B-rated, C-rated political discourse,” sayeth the General. I used to have a favorite saying, “You’d have to go to college to come up with an idea that stupid.” Well, you’d have to be a Rhodes Scholar to come up with an idea this stupid.

A lot of people just flatly don’t understand the notion of free speech.

Xoff’s Double Standard on Free Speech

Leftist Bill Christofferson, on Uppity Wisconsin, has a post huffing and puffing about how Charlie Sykes is a big bully.

As the story goes:

Richard Abdoo is the CEO of Wisconsin Energy Corp., based in Milwaukee. Earlier this fall, Abdoo sent a $250 check to the peace group Not in Our Name (www.notinourname.net).

As a result, his name was listed as one of the 30,000 endorsers of the group’s “Statement of Conscience Against War and Repression.” And he was identified as “Chairman of the Board, president and CEO, Wisconsin Energy Corp.” Abdoo said the donation was strictly a personal one.

Sykes, like other talk radio hosts, attacked Abdoo for the contribution, and after a considerable public uproar, Abdoo sent out an e-mail apologizing for having made it.

For Christofferson, this is about how “right-wing talk radio, which -- aided and abetted by the squishy local newspaper -- used the airwaves to shut up a dissenting voice in Milwaukee.”

The logic here is so bad that a poster quickly provided a little lesson in what free speech really means.

Let me see if I have this straight.

Mr. Abdoo choose to exercise his first amendment rights and support a group of people who are opposed to the war.

Mr. Sykes choose to exercise his first amendment rights and spoke out negatively against Mr. Abdoo and his political views.

A group of citizens choose to not economically support the company Mr. Abdoo works for because of his political views.

Let’s take them one at a time.

Mr. Abdoo supported a certain political view and then was held accountable for it. That is how it works. We do have the right to free speech but we also may be held accountable for it. If you tell your wife that her jeans make her butt look big, you will be held accountable. I have never understood why people think the first amendment should protect them from the things they say. . . .

Mr. Sykes used his popularity to express his concern over Mr. Abdoo’s political views. That is what radio hosts do. And Mr. Sykes is held accountable for what he says. If people stop listening to his show, the sponsors will stop sending the station money. But people do listen so they must like what they hear or at least respect Mr. Sykes right to say them.

100 – 150 people contacted Wisconsin Energy to express their concern. That is what consumers do. We choose where and with whom we will spend our dollars. . . . My wife and I recently left a car lot because we did not like something the salesman said. We bought a car somewhere else. He had every right to say what he said, and we had every right to go somewhere else. Not only do we have the freedom of speech in this country, we also have the freedom of choice.

And how does any of this have anything to do with the Patriot Act? The first amendment has around since before 911.

And then there is this.

“We believe that questioning, criticism, and dissent must be valued and protected. We understand that such rights and values are always contested and must be fought for.”

For some reason, Mr. Abdoo’s questioning, criticism and dissent must be protected and Mr. Sykes questioning, criticism and dissent must be stopped.

But it gets worse.

Deeply skeptical that Christofferson really believes that people should be able to say anything without consequences, we searched the blog for “Don Imus.”

And of course we found a post by Christofferson’s cohort RKing on the shock jock.

NBC drops racist Imus

General Motors pulled their advertising dollars away from racist hate.
American Express pulled their advertising dollars away from racist hate.
Sprint pulled their advertising dollars away from racist hate.
Nextel pulled their advertising dollars away from racist hate.
GlaxoSmithKline pulled their advertising dollars away from racist hate.
TD Ameritrade pulled their advertising dollars away from racist hate.
Ditech.com pulled their advertising dollars away from racist hate.

So, who is putting advertising dollars into Rush’s vulgar hate show?
So, who is putting advertising dollars into Hannity’s vulgar hate show?
So, who is putting advertising dollars into O’Reilly’s vulgar hate show?
So, who is putting advertising dollars into FOX Whore News in general?
So, who is putting advertising dollars into any racist and vulgar hate show?

CBS fires Imus from radio Now let’s go after Rush, Hannity etc...

If somebody could corner Christofferson on this, we’re pretty sure that he would explain that what Richard Abdoo did was . . . well . . . good, and therefore he should not face any flack because of it. But on the other hand, Imus (like Rush and Hannity and O’Reilly and Fox News) is evil, and thus it was good to take his job away.

The simple truth, of course, is that there is a nasty strain of authoritarianism among 21st century liberals. They simply can’t abide nor tolerate views different from their own, and they can’t accept that the rules that apply to everybody else apply to them.

Why Won’t Catholic Outreach Talk to the Media?

When The Warrior did a quite favorable feature on Catholic student organizations on the Marquette campus, one organization was conspicuously missing: Catholic Outreach.

Since Catholic Outreach is a project of the University Ministry, this was a rather glaring omission.

But the reason for the omission was explained in a column by Mike Rudzinski, Warrior editor.

It seems we weren’t the only student-run organization asking the question [who are we?]. This issue, we focus on Catholic leaders on campus who ask the tough questions: “who are you Marquette, and what is your true mission?” Go Roman Week sought out the soul of Marquette as a Catholic, Jesuit institution.

The answer to our paper’s own identity search came while investigating this week’s feature story. Catholic Outreach, a university sponsored Catholic organization, wanted to be included in the story but was unable to do so without university approval. University Ministry needed to review our questions and approve the article before it could be published.

This contradicts our journalistic code of ethics. As students, as Americans, as human beings we all have the right to speak freely without censorship. As an independent publication and voice of the student body, The Warrior refuses to be censored, and so should you.

We quickly established that what Rudzinski says about attempted censorship is accurate -- or at least, it correctly reflects what The Warrior was told when it tried to do an interview.

Wanting to get to the bottom of this, we yesterday phoned Ann Mulgrew, the University Ministry staffer who oversees Catholic Outreach. She said she was unaware of this situation, and would get back to us.

We also attempted to reach three officers of the organization: Riad el-Azem, Aaron Morey and Rebecca Baehrend.

Two of the three failed to respond to our multiple e-mail and voice mail messages. The third talked briefly, giving evasive and apparently disingenuous answers before terminating the interview.

We called Ann Mulgrew back today, and she was extremely huffy, objecting to the fact that we had tried to reach the officers of the group. Some, she said, had contacted her to “complain.” Apparently, in her view, journalists should accept the “authoritative” view of events that she hands out, and not try to develop independent sources.

In other words, she inadvertently reinforced the impression that the whole Warrior affair gave.

She then refused to talk further. It seemed to us that she was using a contrived grievance to evade answering embarrassing questions about University Ministry policies.

This raises some serious questions about the University Ministry, and about the bureaucratic culture there.

• Why are they so fearful about letting students speak? They, after all, constituted Catholic Outreach and chose the officers. Why don’t they trust their own student officers?
• Why are the student officers so fearful of the University Ministry? Why do they consent to be censored?
• Why the mania on the part of University Ministry to control information? They claim to want to prevent “inaccurate” information from getting out. But in the minds of bureaucrats obsessed with control, “inaccurate” is likely to equal “information that reflects badly on us.”

The truth, of course, is that if you let people speak freely, some will say inaccurate things, some will say dumb things and some things will be misreported.

Apparently in a couple of past instances, Catholic Outreach officers have gone a bit too far and said things that the University Ministry thought to be out of line.

That’s the risk anybody operating in the public arena takes. Why does the University Ministry think different rules apply to them?

The University Ministry is, at least nominally, a Christian operation. So it ought to be known for speaking truthfully and speaking boldly. Instead, it seems to be a haven for risk-averse bureaucrats.

And the ethos has infected the students in the organization’s orbit.