Category Archives: rights

A Protest for Free Speech

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On Wednesday, the Young Conservatives of Texas club at the University of Texas at Austin held an “affirmative action bake sale” offering cookies at different prices based on the race and sex of the buyer.

A cookie cost $1.50 for Asian males, $1 for white males, and 50 cents for African-American and Hispanic males. Cookies for American Indians of both genders were free of charge.

[The affirmative action link is in the original of the above quote; I included it so readers can see Instagram’s complicity at the time of my writing (27 Oct) in censoring this bit of news.]

That pricing is a direct reflection of the nature of UT Austin’s affirmative action programs, which similarly varies accesses to the school based on ethnicity and not merit.

But never mind that.  The school objected to having its racist policies so blatantly illustrated.  Gregory Vincent, the school’s Vice President for Diversity and Community Engagement, had this on the matter:

[F]ocusing our attention on the provocative nature of the YCT’s actions ignores a much more important issue: they create an environment of exclusion and disrespect among our students, faculty and staff[.]

Such dialectics are at the core of freely conducted debate, though.  This university’s management plainly does not understand actual freedoms acknowledged in the First Amendment.

Embarrassingly, Vincent went on, and unable to form a coherent argument on the matter, stooped to attacking the protestors and not the protestors’ argument.

He…questioned the club’s motive behind the bake sale.

This is what our State’s tax dollars are buying, and it’s not education.

Guilty

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Concerning Eric Garner’s chokehold death, Attorney General Loretta Lynch (D) has made up her mind.  NYPD officers are guilty of murder, and she wants a prompt hanging, no more delays.  Those impertinent New York City-based FBI agents, all of whom have recommended against Federal charges against the officers, have been relieved of their duties on the case and replaced en masse by FBI agents from…elsewhere.  Lynch’s DC-located Civil Rights Division of her DoJ have taken the matter over.

Never mind that a State investigation has already been completed, and the State’s prosecutor failed to get a grand jury to indict—in an environment (not limited to New York) where a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich—any of NYPD’s finest in the case.

Lynch Knows Better.

Free Speech, Again

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A New Jersey high school has come under fire after holding a ceremony honoring law enforcement, military and first responders before a football game Friday night.

And

It featured State Police Pipes and Drums of the Blue and Gold, state and local mounted units, personnel from all of the branches of the military and officers from several local offices. It also honored a Linden police officer who was wounded in a shootout with Ahmad Khan Rahimi, who is accused of planting IEDs in Seaside Park, Elizabeth and New York City[.]

So far, so good, you might think.

“It’s OK to stand up for social justice, inequality, and reform,” [Middletown Deputy Police Chief Stephen] Dollinger told the [Asbury Park Press]. “It’s another thing to not stand up for the national anthem.”

Uh oh.  That’s not allowed.  It’s OK to protest.  It’s not OK to protest the protesters or the protest methods.  No, the Left insists we just shut up about that.  The ACLU, the Central Jersey Chapter of National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, and the Greater Long Branch NAACP all objected to such impertinence in a letter to the high school.

According to press reports, however, the event is being used to intimidate and ostracize people who express their views about systemic racism and social just.

Law enforcement officers are sworn to protect the constitution, and it is a disservice to the students and players that an event that should focus on them, their families, and their communities is being used to send a message that people who express concerns about disparities in the criminal justice system are unwelcome, disloyal or unpatriotic.

And

One ACLU organizer, Jasmine Crenshaw, believes the event sent a “frightening message….”

Sure.  It’s frightening—to the Left, anyway—that people not under the Left’s control would speak freely.

She Was Right the First Time

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Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, recall, commented on NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling when our national anthem was played before the start of San Francisco 49ers games, saying that Kaepernick and his ilk have the right to protest but that it’s “dumb and disrespectful.”

Now she’s apologizing for saying that, even though she’s done nothing here that wants an apology.  She’s doing so, too, just a short time after she expressed her contempt for Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump, thereby irrevocably demonstrating her prejudice and the fact that she’d prejudged any case that might come before the Court from a Trump administration.

This is another Supreme Court vacancy waiting to happen, and not too long into the next administration.

A Good Move

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WFAY-AM, broadcasting out of Fayetteville, NC, normally carries East Carolina University football games.  No more, at least for a while.

WFAY-AM in Fayetteville announced Tuesday that it would not carry the Pirates’ game at South Florida scheduled for Saturday. The move comes after the school said 19 band members kneeled during the anthem before the game against Central Florida….

Of course, the band members have a free speech right to protest and to disrespect our flag and our national anthem in the course of that protest.

But—and this is a point too many on the Left choose to ignore—the rest of us have the same free speech right to protest the protest and/or its technique, and to take action in counter to that protest.

Good for WFAY, and good for the station’s sponsors, who agreed with the decision.