Monday, September 29, 2003
Bake Sales (Freedom of Speech Triumphs or at least tries to triumph)
FrontPage magazine.com: "Two, Three, Many Bake Sales
By Brendan Steinhauser
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 29, 2003
This past Thursday, September 24th, was a dark day for freedom of speech on college campuses. An Affirmative Action bake sale organized by The Young Conservatives of Texas was shut down by the administration at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. The idea of the bake sale was to show that discrimination is wrong by selling cookies at prices that corresponded to the consumer’s race. While white males were asked to pay one dollar, hispanic and black students paid less.
The administration responded to this act of protest by closing the bake sale down because a few students claimed to be offended. At least one black student filed a grievance with the university. Tim Moore, director of the Hughes-Trigg Student Center at SMU remarked, “This was not an issue of free speech. It was really an issue where we had a hostile environment being created that was potentially volatile.' According to this Orwellian reasoning, free speech only applies to issues so dull or meaningless as to generate no controversy. By these standards, Martin Luther King Jr. would not have been allowed to give his “I Have a Dream Speech.” Everyone knows how volatile the civil rights movement was in America, but should the concept have been suppressed because narrow-minded redneck hatemongers were offended?
Once again the hypocrisy of the academic establishment has been exposed. To them, free speech only applies to “politically correct” ideas, like support of Affirmative Action. The paradoxical aspect of leftist beliefs is that any speech that does not fit into the paradigm of liberal thought must be prohibited in the name of “tolerance” -- a tolerance that excludes toleration of conflicting views.
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By Brendan Steinhauser
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 29, 2003
This past Thursday, September 24th, was a dark day for freedom of speech on college campuses. An Affirmative Action bake sale organized by The Young Conservatives of Texas was shut down by the administration at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. The idea of the bake sale was to show that discrimination is wrong by selling cookies at prices that corresponded to the consumer’s race. While white males were asked to pay one dollar, hispanic and black students paid less.
The administration responded to this act of protest by closing the bake sale down because a few students claimed to be offended. At least one black student filed a grievance with the university. Tim Moore, director of the Hughes-Trigg Student Center at SMU remarked, “This was not an issue of free speech. It was really an issue where we had a hostile environment being created that was potentially volatile.' According to this Orwellian reasoning, free speech only applies to issues so dull or meaningless as to generate no controversy. By these standards, Martin Luther King Jr. would not have been allowed to give his “I Have a Dream Speech.” Everyone knows how volatile the civil rights movement was in America, but should the concept have been suppressed because narrow-minded redneck hatemongers were offended?
Once again the hypocrisy of the academic establishment has been exposed. To them, free speech only applies to “politically correct” ideas, like support of Affirmative Action. The paradoxical aspect of leftist beliefs is that any speech that does not fit into the paradigm of liberal thought must be prohibited in the name of “tolerance” -- a tolerance that excludes toleration of conflicting views.
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