WHEN DO YOU HEAR AN IVY LEAGUE STORY THAT ISN’T AN EMBARRASSMENT THESE DAYS? Sadness, shame and blame at Yale over First Amendment repeal video.
Members of the Yale University community on Thursday responded with a mix of embarrassment, sadness and literal disbelief to a viral video showing students there freely signing a petition that calls for the repeal of the First Amendment.
“It numbs the mind that dozens of Yale students could sign a petition to revoke the First Amendment,” freshman Grant Richardson wrote FoxNews.com in an email. “Besides the fact that the First Amendment lists the most fundamentally important rights we hold as Americans, it is rather embarrassing to think Yalies could not see the irony that they were petitioning away – their right to petition.”
Richardson, responding to a video by filmmaker and satirist Ami Horowitz that first aired on FoxNews.com Wednesday, said he hopes the actions of those shown in the video don’t reflect on him or many other students.
“It is mortifying to think that family, friends and future employers could equate such behaviors to Yale, and by extension, to me,” he said. “I can only hope that my fellow students were answering in jest.”
A member of the Yale Law School faculty also responded to the video, and wasn’t happy with what he saw.
“It’s a sad commentary on the present state of public opinion,” said Professor Bruce Ackerman. . . .
But Ackerman said he also felt the First Amendment debate wasn’t as important as more pressing issues.
“It does not remotely pose the same danger as the support of all Republican candidates, with the exception of Rand Paul, for President Obama’s unilateral war against ISIS in plain violation of the Constitution,” Ackerman said.
That part of the professor’s response didn’t sit well with Horowitz.
“This is exactly part of the problem. Why would Yale students, or university students anywhere in this country, feel a fidelity to our fundamental beliefs, when their professors try to shoehorn in anti-American sentiment at every opportunity?” he told FoxNews.com.
Yale Law School was a center of hardcore support for free expression once. But that was when leftists were the ones speaking. Now that leftists are the ones doing the persecuting, Yale Law isn’t nearly as strong.