Tag Archives: Harassment

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Democrats push for school quotas and speech codes in defense bill amendment

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Washington D.C. lawyer Hans Bader explains at College Insurrection blog.

Excerpt:

Suing schools and colleges has nothing to do with supporting our troops.

But that didn’t stop Senators from seeking to add an amendment, SA 3215, to the 2013 Defense Authorization bill on Thursday, containing provisions that would overturn two Supreme Court rulings in order to promote such lawsuits. The amendment, proposed by Senators Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Al Franken (D-Minn.), Bernie Sanders (Vt.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), would dramatically expand the reach of two federal statutes, Title VI and Title IX, to allow colleges, schools, and recipients of federal funds to be sued for “disparate impact.”

Disparate impact is what people call school policies that have no motive to discriminate, but end up affecting some groups more than others. For example, standardized tests for mathematics have nothing to do with race, but some racial groups perform better than others. The Democrats think that this is grounds for a lawsuit, apparently.

More:

The amendment, backed by trial lawyers, would also allow colleges, schools, and other institutions to be sued for unlimited punitive damages.

[…]The specter of liability for disparate impact could make schools get rid of standardized tests designed to ensure that students are really learning, and detect failing schools, since all but the easiest standardized tests arguably have a racially “disparate impact.”

It could also result in racial quotas in school discipline. The Obama Administration has alreadypressured some school districts to adopt de facto racial quotas in school discipline (school districts are reluctant to defy the Administration’s legally-dubious demands lest it cut off their federal funds), requiring even liberal school districts that already bend over backwards not to suspend disruptive black students to cut their suspension rates, and spend millions of dollars to comply with bureaucratic dictates imposed by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, where I used to work.

[…]Expanding Title VI liability and punitive damages could also lead to more campus speech codes, as colleges, terrified of racial harassment liability under Title VI, clamp down on any speech that might conceivably contribute to what is perceived as a racially hostile learning environment.

Hans explains why these laws cause schools and universities to create “speech codes”:

But schools persist in imposing overbroad harassment policies, both because they would rather be sued for First Amendment violations than for racial or sexual harassment… and because private colleges are not directly subject to the First Amendment at all, but can be sued for racial and sexual harassment.

[…][T]o avoid liability, private colleges in particular may clamp down on campus speech about racial and sexual issues like affirmative action and feminism, lest such speech provide potential “building blocks” of a hostile environment claim under the “totality of circumstances” test.

Trial lawyers are one of the groups that donate a lot of money to Democrats, so naturally they will be happy with any law that makes more business for them.

 

News

Gay rights activists vandalize church for posting pro-marriage sign

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Anti-marriage gay activists vandalize church
Anti-marriage gay activists vandalize church

From the Newcastle Herald (Australia). (H/T Bill Muehlenberg)

Excerpt:

Vandals attacked Wallsend Presbyterian Church last night in response to a message criticising same-sex marriage displayed on the building’s outside notice board.

The church on Nelson Street had updated its message board last week to read “Even tradies know you need both male and female joints to make a marriage”.

The front of the 1867 building, which recently received a $12,000 makeover, was defaced with messages such as ‘‘sexuality is not a choice’’ and ‘‘love thy neighbour not hate gays’’.

Reverend Dr Ian Copland said the sign was a play on words and he wanted people to talk about the issue being raised in federal parliament.

He said he has no regrets despite the outcome.

‘‘This is not going to stop me,’’ he said.

Two bills to legalise same-sex marriage were introduced in Federal Parliament this week.

‘‘It’s obviously a reaction to the sign but I have no malice towards the vandals,’’ Rev Copland said.

‘‘It only takes one or two cowards you can’t blame the whole homosexual community. That would be wrong.’’

This is not the first time the church has been attacked regarding its stance on same-sex marriage.

The signboard was vandalised about six months ago when the reverend posted a similar message.

Don’t expect to see this story plastered on all the newspapers in the world for six months. It doesn’t fit the mainstream media’s secular leftist worldview.

Bill writes:

So this is how the tolerant brigade makes its case: by attacking and defacing and causing damage to a church. Yep, we sure do love how you guys do business. All that love and tolerance is just oozing out here. But if this were not bad enough, look closely at that photo again.

Did you see one of the bits of graffiti? It says this: “Tolerance is a virtue”. I kid you not. Look at it again! Don’t you just love how these guys demonstrate all their wonderful love of tolerance? They bend over backwards trying to be the most intolerant bunch in the country. And they are succeeding just fine.

As I mentioned, no commentary is really needed here. Just soak in the irony, the duplicity, the double standards and the hypocrisy. I love it when these guys make our case for us. I could never have done such a good enough job to demonstrate all this. So they kindly go and do it for me.

Thanks guys. Keep it up. We expect to see even more such cases of love, acceptance and tolerance in the near future. We know full well how you operate, and we look forward to more expressions of tolerance.

Click here for a sampling of anti-marriage vandalism, violence and harassment from anti-Prop 8 gay activists.

Please note: comments to this post will be filtered based on Obama’s law restricting free speech on controversial issues.

News

How the left uses “bullying” to restrict free speech that offends them

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From Hans Bader at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Full text: (links removed)

A school superintendant has labeled a column in a school newspaper thatcriticized homosexuality as “bullying.” (The Shawano High School newspaper decided to run dueling student opinion pieces on whether same-sex couples should be able to adopt children; the student article that was labeled as “bullying” answered the question “no.” The school district also publicly apologized for the column, and said that it is “taking steps to prevent items of this nature from happening in the future.”)

Whatever the wisdom (or lack thereof) of featuring something like that in a school newspaper, it seems strange to argue that a viewpoint in a student newspaper is “bullying.” (The Shawano School District’s bullying policy provides that “bullying” may lead to “warning, suspension,” “expulsion,” etc.) A conservative Christian who thought that homosexuality was immoral successfully challenged a school “harassment” code that punished students with such viewpoints in Saxe v. State College Area School District(2001), a case in which a federal appeals court ruled that there is no “harassment” exception to the First Amendment for speech which offends members of minority groups. Speech cannot be banned simply by labeling it as violence, either: for example, in Bauer v.Sampson, another federal appeals court ruled that a campus newspaper’s illustration depicting a college official’s imaginary death was protected by the First Amendment, even though the college declared it a violation of its policy against “workplace violence.”

But schools and anti-bullying activists have adopted incredibly overbroad definitions of bullying. The anti-bullying website NoBully.com, and schools like Fox Hill and Alvarado Elementary, define even “eye rolling” and other expressions of displeasure or hostility as bullying, even though doing so raises First Amendment problems.

The Obama administration claims bullying is an “epidemic” and a “pandemic.” But in reality, bullying and violence have steadily gone down in the nation’s schools, as studies funded by the Justice Department have shown. The Obama administration’s StopBullying.gov website defines a vast array of speech and conduct as bullying: it classifies “teasing” as a form of “bullying,” and “rude” or “hurtful” “text messages” as “cyberbullying.” Since “creating web sites” that “make fun of others” also is deemed “cyberbullying,” conservative websites that poke fun at the president are presumably guilty of cyberbullying under this strange definition. (Law professors such as UCLA’s Eugene Volokh have criticized bills by liberal lawmakers like Congresswoman Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.) that would ban some criticism of politicians as cyberbullying.)

It’s very important to understand what liberals mean when they say “bullying” and how they use it to silence those who might offend them. It’s using government power to force individuals to accept the morality of the state. There’s a word for that.