They are, but blame for the outrage also goes to authors and publishers. You publish garbage. Now one has to read your shit, and the push-back is appropriate.
At the Los Angeles Times, "Book bans are soaring in U.S. schools, fueled largely by new laws in Republican-led states."
Another big day at the Supreme Court.
At the Los Angeles Times, "Supreme Court rules for coach whose prayers on field raised church-state questions":
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Monday for a former high school football coach whose prayers at the 50-yard line drew crowds and controversy, declaring his public prayers were protected as free speech. The 6-3 decision is a symbolic victory for those who seek a larger role for prayers and religion in public schools. The court stressed that Coach Joe Kennedy’s prayers began as private and personal expression and were not official acts of promoting religion at school. Writing for the majority, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said, “Both the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses of the 1st Amendment protect expressions like Mr. Kennedy’s. Nor does a proper understanding of the Amendment’s Establishment Clause require the government to single out private religious speech for special disfavor. The Constitution and the best of our traditions counsel mutual respect and tolerance, not censorship and suppression, for religious and nonreligious views alike.” The court’s three liberals dissented. “This case is about whether a public school must permit a school official to kneel, bow his head, and say a prayer at the center of a school event. The Constitution does not authorize, let alone require, public schools to embrace this conduct,” said Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Since 1962, “this court consistently has recognized that school officials leading prayer is constitutionally impermissible. Official-led prayer strikes at the core of our constitutional protections for the religious liberty of students and their parents, as embodied in both the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the 1st Amendment,” Sotomayor said. What began with the coach kneeling by himself on the 50-yard line became a highly publicized event in 2015 that drew a crowd of players and spectators onto the field at the end of games. Kennedy was an assistant coach on a yearly contract at the Bremerton High School in Washington when he began to pray at the end of games. School officials warned him against continuing the prayers because they had become a public event. They said his prayers at schools could be seen as violating the Constitution’s ban on an “establishment of religion.” Kennedy said he would “fight” the decision and took his case to the local media. He was suspended when he refused to follow the district’s guidance, and he was not rehired for the next year. With the help of the Texas-based First Liberty Institute, he filed a suit against the school district contesting his dismissal. The 1st Amendment protects the freedom of speech and the free exercise of religion while prohibiting an “establishment of religion,” and all three clauses were at the issue in the case of Kennedy vs. Bremerton School District. The high court said the key issue was whether the coach’s prayer was private and personal, or whether instead he was speaking as a public employee at school. “It seems clear to us that Mr. Kennedy has demonstrated that his speech was private speech, not government speech,” Gorsuch wrote. “When Mr. Kennedy uttered the three prayers that resulted in his suspension, he was not engaged in speech ordinarily within the scope of his duties as a coach. He did not speak pursuant to government policy. He was not seeking to convey a government-created message. Simply put: Mr. Kennedy’s prayers did not “ow[e their] existence” to Mr. Kennedy’s responsibilities as a public employee.” In the past, the court had ruled that government employees are not as protected as whistleblowers if they speak or reveal confidential matters that were part of their job. But in Monday’s opinion, the coach was not acting as a government employee when he prayed on the field...
Still more.
Heh.
Free speech is like water running downhill. If a tree falls to block the flow, the stream just rolls up and over and keeps on going down.
At Yahoo News, "Hawley Book Picked Up by Regnery Publishing after Being Dropped by Simon and Schuster."
An awesome video, featuring Kelly Shackleford, for Prager University:
Damn, this is something https://t.co/TbtbTbw6YI— Milena Rodban (@MilenaRodban) November 23, 2019
On the First Amendment
This message was sent to the Kelley School of Business community Nov. 20, 2019.
Professor Eric Rasmusen has, for many years, used his private social media accounts to disseminate his racist, sexist, and homophobic views. When I label his views in this way, let me note that the labels are not a close call, nor do his posts require careful parsing to reach these conclusions. He has posted, among many other things, the following pernicious and false stereotypes:
*That he believes that women do not belong in the workplace, particularly not in academia, and that he believes most women would prefer to have a boss than be one; he has used slurs in his posts about women;Ordinarily, I would not dignify these bigoted statements with repetition, but we need to confront exactly what we are dealing with in Professor Rasmusen’s posts. His expressed views are stunningly ignorant, more consistent with someone who lived in the 18th century than the 21st. Sometimes Professor Rasmusen explains his views as animated by his Christian faith, although Christ was neither a bigot nor did he use slurs; indeed, he counseled avoiding judgments. Rhetorically speaking, Professor Rasmusen has demonstrated no difficulty in casting the first, or the lethal, stone.
*That gay men should not be permitted in academia either, because he believes they are promiscuous and unable to avoid abusing students;
*That he believes that black students are generally unqualified for attendance at elite institutions, and are generally inferior academically to white students.
His latest posts slurring women were picked up by a person with a heavily followed Twitter account, and various officials at Indiana University have been inundated in the last few days with demands that he be fired. We cannot, nor would we, fire Professor Rasmusen for his posts as a private citizen, as vile and stupid as they are, because the First Amendment of the United States Constitution forbids us to do so. That is not a close call.
Indiana University has a strong nondiscrimination policy, and as an institution adheres to values that are the opposite of Professor Rasmusen’s expressed values. We demand tolerance and respect in the workplace and in the classroom, and if Professor Rasmusen acted upon his expressed views in the workplace to judge his students or colleagues on the basis of their gender, sexual orientation, or race to their detriment, such as in promotion and tenure decisions or in grading, he would be acting both illegally and in violation of our policies and we would investigate and address those allegations according to our processes. Moreover, in my view, students who are women, gay, or of color could reasonably be concerned that someone with Professor Rasmusen’s expressed prejudices and biases would not give them a fair shake in his classes, and that his expressed biases would infect his perceptions of their work. Given the strength and longstanding nature of his views, these concerns are reasonable.
Therefore, the Kelley School is taking a number of steps to ensure that students not add the baggage of bigotry to their learning experience:
* No student will be forced to take a class from Professor Rasmusen. The Kelley School will provide alternatives to Professor Rasmusen’s classes;If other steps are needed to protect our students or colleagues from bigoted actions, Indiana University will take them.
* Professor Rasmusen will use double-blind grading on assignments; if there are components of grading that cannot be subject to a double-blind procedure, the Kelley School will have another faculty member ensure that the grades are not subject to Professor Rasmusen’s prejudices.
The First Amendment is strong medicine, and works both ways. All of us are free to condemn views that we find reprehensible, and to do so as vehemently and publicly as Professor Rasmusen expresses his views. We are free to avoid his classes, and demand that the university ensure that he does not, or has not, acted on those views in ways that violate either the federal and state civil rights laws or IU’s nondiscrimination policies. I condemn, in the strongest terms, Professor Rasmusen’s views on race, gender, and sexuality, and I think others should condemn them. But my strong disagreement with his views—indeed, the fact that I find them loathsome—is not a reason for Indiana University to violate the Constitution of the United States.
This is a lesson, unfortunately, that all of us need to take seriously, even as we support our colleagues and classmates in their perfectly reasonable anger and disgust that someone who is a professor at an elite institution would hold, and publicly proclaim, views that our country, and our university, have long rejected as wrong and immoral.
Lauren Robel
Executive Vice President and Provost
We invited @JamesADamore to speak about viewpoint diversity & his memo. Some were determined to shut us down. Full video: https://t.co/nmoWgMTmi7 #JamesDamorePSU pic.twitter.com/0BDdKf1K4a
— Andy C. Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) February 26, 2018
Reason welcomes The Volokh Conspiracy! https://t.co/En6HDckU70 pic.twitter.com/8lqsgQuGsx
— reason (@reason) December 13, 2017
Contextual... creative... holistic... these are the subtleties that grease the way to the end of constitutional rights.Click through to hit that donate button at Althouse.
Thanks to the ACLU for standing up for free speech where it counts — when the speaker is hated.
You can donate to the ACLU here.
Contemporary social justice activism is a quasi religion and dissent is heresy | @JonahNRO https://t.co/iWSwWs1lD2 pic.twitter.com/UtdPBgxYlU
— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) June 23, 2017
In the past, threats to free speech have taken many forms—nationalist passion, Comstockery (both good and bad), political suppression, etc.—but the threat to free speech today is different. It is less top-down and more bottom-up. We are cultivating a generation of young people to reject free speech as an important value.
One could mark the beginning of the self-esteem movement with Nathaniel Branden’s 1969 paper, “The Psychology of Self-Esteem,” which claimed that “feelings of self-esteem were the key to success in life.” This understandable idea ran amok in our schools and in our culture. When I was a kid, Saturday-morning cartoons were punctuated with public-service announcements telling kids: “The most important person in the whole wide world is you, and you hardly even know you!”
The self-esteem craze was just part of the cocktail of educational fads. Other ingredients included multiculturalism, the anti-bullying crusade, and, of course, that broad phenomenon known as “political correctness.” Combined, they’ve produced a generation that rejects the old adage “sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never harm me” in favor of the notion that “words hurt.” What we call political correctness has been on college campuses for decades. But it lacked a critical mass of young people who were sufficiently receptive to it to make it a fully successful ideology. The campus commissars welcomed the new “snowflakes” with open arms; truly, these are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
“Words hurt” is a fashionable concept in psychology today. (See Psychology Today: “Why Words Can Hurt at Least as Much as Sticks and Stones.”) But it’s actually a much older idea than the “sticks and stones” aphorism. For most of human history, it was a crime to say insulting or “injurious” things about aristocrats, rulers, the Church, etc. That tendency didn’t evaporate with the Divine Right of Kings. Jonathan Haidt has written at book length about our natural capacity to create zones of sanctity, immune from reason.
And that is the threat free speech faces today. Those who inveigh against “hate speech” are in reality fighting “heresy speech”—ideas that do “violence” to sacred notions of self-esteem, racial or gender equality, climate change, and so on. Put whatever label you want on it, contemporary “social justice” progressivism acts as a religion, and it has no patience for blasphemy...
This what leftists want here. Coming to America? #Islam #Jihad #RadicalLeft #ClimateOfHate #Facebook https://t.co/dikJsikdKQ
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) June 22, 2017
This man used Facebook to express his hatred for muslims & has gone to prison #WeStandTogether against hate crimes https://t.co/Bo7OCDADKu
— Sussex Police (@sussex_police) June 20, 2017
UC Berkeley’s descent from place of learning to victimology hothouse https://t.co/sWdeo1CVG3 pic.twitter.com/pPulRc1FtK
— L.A. Times Opinion (@latimesopinion) February 6, 2017
Even before its students rioted in the streets, distressed that right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos would dare to open his mouth in their presence, UC Berkeley presented a visual illustration of the academy’s decline from a place of learning to a victimology hothouse. Within walking distance on the Berkeley campus are emblems of both a vanished academic world and the diversity-industrial complex that ousted it.Still more.
Emblem 1: In Bauhaus-era typography, a quotation from Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo adorns the law school’s otherwise brutalist facade.
“You will study the wisdom of the past, for in a wilderness of conflicting counsels, a trail has there been blazed. You will study the life of mankind, for this is the life you must order, and, to order with wisdom, must know. You will study the precepts of justice, for these are the truths that through you shall come to their hour of triumph. Here is the high emprise, the fine endeavor, the splendid possibility of achievement, to which I summon you and bid you welcome.”
No law school today, if erecting itself from scratch, would think of parading such sentiments, first uttered in 1925, on its exterior. Cardozo’s invocation of “mankind” is alone cause for removal, but equally transgressive is his belief that there is wisdom in the past and not just discrimination. He presents learning as a heroic enterprise focused not on the self but on the vast world beyond, both past and present. Education is the search for objective knowledge that takes the learner into a grander universe of thought and achievement.
Stylistically, Cardozo’s elevated tone is as old-fashioned as his complicated syntactical cadences; his exhortation to intellectual mastery is too “masculinist” and triumphal for today’s identity-obsessed university.
His celebration of the law overlooks the teachings of critical race theory, which purports to expose the racial subtext of seemingly benign legal concepts. And he fatally omits any mention of “inclusion” and “diversity.”
There’s not a trace of the heroic on the Berkeley law school’s website today; the closest it comes to any ennobling inspiration is the statement: “We believe that a Berkeley Law degree is a tool for change, both locally and globally.”
But this bland expression of progressive ideology is positively Miltonic compared with the bromides on display just meters away from the law school .
Emblem 2: UC Berkeley’s Division of Equity and Inclusion has placed vertical banners across the main campus reminding students of the contemporary university’s paramount mission: assigning guilt and innocence within the ruthlessly competitive hierarchy of victimhood. Each banner shows a photo of a student or a member of the student-services bureaucracy, beside a purported quotation from that student or bureaucrat. No rolling cadences here, no exhortations to intellectual conquest. Instead, just whining or penitential snippets from the academic lexicon of identity politics.
“I will acknowledge how power and privilege intersect in our daily lives,” vows an Asian female member of the class of 2017. Just how crippling is that intersection? The answer comes in a banner showing a black female student in a backward baseball cap and a male Latino student, who together urge the Berkeley community to “create an environment where people other than yourself can exist.”
A naive observer of the Berkeley campus would think that lots of people “other than yourself” exist there, and would even think that Berkeley welcomes those “other” people with overflowing intellectual and material riches. Such a misperception, however, is precisely why Berkeley funds the Division of Equity and Inclusion with a cool $20 million annually and staffs it with 150 full-time functionaries: It takes that much money and personnel to drum into students’ heads how horribly Berkeley treats its “othered” students.
A member of the student-services bureaucracy reinforces the message of continual oppression on her banner. “I will be a brave and sympathetic ally,” announces Bene Gatzert of University Health Services. Cardozo saw grandeur in the mastery of the common law; today’s campus functionary sees herself in a heroic struggle against the ubiquitous forces of white-male heterosexual oppression...
