“Congress shall make no law…”
This is how the past two days have begun and ended for me. I’m taking a U.S. Government class (it’s a California state requirement for undergrads) as well as Law of Mass Communication which is a requirement for the journalism major. Suffice to say… There’s been a lot of talk and reading about the First Amendment between those two classes in the past few days. The content of each class pretty much overlaps, although the Law of Mass Comm. class deals with more of the specifics of what is discussed in my government class. On one hand it’s nice to have two classes so closely related that I get the broad scope of how our government works as well as the specifics of how it works (court cases, policy, restrictions on the government, statues vs. rules and regulations etc.) but its contributed to an enormous amount of boredom on my part.
It’s not that I’m not interested in this kind of stuff because I definitely am. As an aspiring journalist (whether I’ll actually be successful remains to be seen) I have to be interested in government and its inter-workings. Or at least stay awake and afloat in class enough to be reasonably well-versed if I ever need to be.
For example, when you know enough about government and the law, you are then able to ask questions about the facts to determine whether something might be unconstitutional or not, or at the very least, whether it will raise questions.
For instance, this morning it was discovered that someone had vandalized the gay and lesbian resource center on the University of Oregon campus. Someone broke in sometime between yesterday afternoon and 1 a.m. and spray painted a large swastika on the center’s carpet. Most people suspect that the vandalism is related to recent controversy on campus with the Pacifica Forum, although no links have been proved thus far. The Pacifica Forum is a group that is categorized as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its invitations of holocaust deniers to speak at events and its alleged condemnations of gays and lesbians. Apparently the University of Oregon, because one of the group members is a retired professor, allows this group to meet on campus to hold discussions and events. This year there has been a considerable uproar about the group coming back to the school (although I do not attend UO I saw postings and groups opposing the Pacifica Forum on Facebook). Associated Students of the University of Oregon (ASUO) are considering a ban on the group in order to take a strong stance against hate speech and support student safety, according to an intern at Autostraddle.com who is a student at U of O.
So. What that all tells me and should tell you is that banning the group would be an obvious violation of the First Amendment (because the University of Oregon is a public school, and therefore controlled by the government). They know that. The most obvious argument to me against banning the Pacifica Forum from the U of O campus is that as a public university, the facilities used by the Forum are in default, a public forum designed for the exercise of free speech by the public. According to my handy dandy Communications Law textbook by John Zelezny, “…If a public forum has been created, government attempts to control the content of speech in that forum are presumptively invalid prior restraints.” Despite all this, from all accounts ASUO appears to be forging ahead with resolutions to ban the group (and potentially similar groups) from campus.
Now as much as I’m not a fan of crazy white supremacist folk, I do have to say that ASUO will be hard pressed to ban groups like this from the campus, especially if it’s not a blanket ban on all outside groups, and if the Pacifica Forum takes U of O to court, they’ll probably win. My campus dealt with similar issues last semester (only on a much, much smaller scale) when an anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-drug etc. etc. preacher paid us an annual visit and all hell broke loose on campus (see my photos from my last post). As much as I hated the guy’s messages, they were all protected under the Constitution, as was his ability to speak on the university campus. It was utterly shocking to me how many people pushed for kicking him out because they didn’t understand that doing so would be a violation of the First Amendment.
Anyway, that’s my rant/input for the day. if you didn’t know about what happened at U of O, now you do. If you didn’t know crazies were allowed to be on public university campuses, well now you do. If you think I got any of my info wrong, or should’ve expanded more on something, let me know.
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