Academia Continues Its Assault On Free Speech

Duct-taping the Constitution.

An upcoming conference on heterosexual marriage is being denounced as hate speech by the Stanford Graduate Student Council (GSC), which is seeking to quash the event. Last week, the council at the top-ranked California university voted ten to two to deny funding for the event “Communicating Values: Marriage, Family, and Media,” sponsored by the Stanford Anscombe Society.

The council withheld the $600 of requested funding after student outcry over the event’s “anti-LGBT” content, according to the Stanford Daily.

Stanford Anscombe Society (SAS) is a group that “promotes discussion regarding the roles of the family, marriage, and sexual integrity in the lives of Stanford students both now and after graduation.”

“Communicating values” was created in order to “engage in intellectual and civil discourse about the issues of marriage, family, and sexual integrity,” according to the event description.

However, other students weren’t so willing to engage in civil discourse on their campus.

Over 100 students, many organized by the queer graduate group GradQ, showed up at the GSC meeting on “Communicating Values” and, according to the minutes of the meeting, decried “Communicating Values” as hateful and even dangerous to LGBT members of the Stanford community.

In the minutes (transcribed without editing), one student claims that “an event such as this would be a negative event, in schools that have negative events there is a statistically significant increase in suicide.” Another said that “public schools cannot deny student group funding based on viewpoint, but enforcing viewpoint neutral policy that denies funding for hate speech is an entirely different ballgame. Even if Stanford was a public university, it would be perfectly legal to deny funding to events that make LGBT community feel unwelcome.”

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One of the more insidious charades leftists participate in is pretending that elite American universities are churning out intellectually rigorous people who should be running the country. For decades, however, they mostly produce incurious drones who have an unnatural fear of even a slightly differing opinion. Political correctness provides the foundation for freedom’s house of horrors, allowing any non-leftist thought to be labeled “hate”.

It’s almost to the point where Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four will be a feel good story relative to what is actually going on.

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