Halfway through a speech opposing gay marriage, Jonathan Lopez’s community college instructor told him to stop, calling him a “fascist bastard,” the Los Angeles student charges.
A suit has been filed, of course. How could one not be, when this is an attitude present on campus:
In the letter, Dean Allison Jones also said that two students had been "deeply offended" by Lopez's address, one of whom stated that "this student should have to pay some price for preaching hate in the classroom."
I get offended by speech all the time--some of it could even be classified as hate speech. Doesn't mean the speaker should be subject to official sanction.
Update, 2/24/09: Here's more commentary on the topic, from the always-interesting Erin O'Connor.
9 comments:
I've seen worse, but it's only in the last few years that anyone would have reported (or covered) it off campus.
And "MargoMom" is being her usual idiotic self in the comments.
Neither of them should have the right to sue. So you get called a name. So you get your feelings hurt.
I should sue all parties involved for being stupid!
so, if the speech were the other way around, say, promoting gay-marraige. would i be allowed to be offended? and, if i was, could i claim sexual harassment? would school officials see my feelings of being offended as valid?
again, this country is getting too close to speech censorship for me.
~julia
Pomo,
The student is suing because the professor refused to give him a grade for the speech and told him that he would have him expelled if he went to the dean. The student is fighting for his academic survival and also fighting for free speech on campus.
I am deeply offended by their taking offense.
There, do I get special sensitivity rights now?
Leftists and good libs everywhere want people to believe there are no moral absolutes. They don't stop to think that their own position is self-refuting: i.e., their own position is stated in the form of a moral absolute.
When someone else comes along and tries to advocate truth-- i.e., there are moral absolutes-- the lefties trot out the ad-hominem attacks.
Instead, they would be better off examining where their logic takes them.
Having just viewed my district's offering on diversity, I have to say that at some point almost everyone is going to be offended about something. My advice? Get over it. And while you are at it, get over yourself, your self-importance and your position as Belly Button of the Universe.
I don't see what the controversy is. The unprofessional ass ought to be bounced out of his job.
If he wants to express himself there are a whole constellation of venues other then his place of employment in which constitutional guarantees ensure he can shoot his mouth off.
My school had a similar problem last year. Some anti-gay author invited himself to our campus to preach about how homosexuals were like dogs humping the leg of a chair, that they're just monkeys seeking stimulation. The student body is fairly liberal and so, predictably, there was quite a riotous outcry.
Sometimes, a person can be expressing himself very quietly and politely...and it's still a big fat insult. For a person to do this and then demand an equally polite and quiet response assumes an authority he doesn't have. If someone told me that my love isn't legitimate, my anger would be perfectly justified.
I feel the same way about people who want to insult my intelligence under the scientific guise of my brain's ability to "spacially analize". It's an insult. And an insult, no matter how it's put or from whom it's coming (conservative or liberal) is still an insult and should be treated like one.
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