Congressman moves to shore up college free speech

Could Congress punish colleges for blocking free speech? Not now, but maybe someday.

Last week, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, held a joint hearing with two House Oversight subcommittees to highlight the issue.

Recent headlines point to the decline of free and open debate on college campuses. Angry students interrupted a commencement speech by Vice President Mike Pence at Notre Dame University in May. California State University invited conservative commentator Ben Shapiro to campus last year but rescinded the invite after protests erupted on campus. The same thing happened to conservative speaker Ann Coulter at University of California, Berkley, in April.

Jordan told me his constituents don’t want to fund schools that discriminate based on political beliefs.

“I know lots of families in the 4th District who don’t like squelching speech, particularly conservative speech, on campuses they’re helping finance,” he said.

I asked Jordan whether Congress would ever consider withholding money from public universities, and he said, “I do think that’s something we’re going to have to look at. How that plays out, I’m not sure.”

Speakers like Coulter and Shapiro aren’t the victims here, according to Jordan. The victims are the college students who attend liberal public universities and never get to hear the other side of an argument.

“All sides are aggrieved because they don’t get to hear the full engaged debate that we’re supposed to have in this country,” Jordan told me. “When you have government institutions limiting people’s First Amendment rights and the ability to have the free and fair exchange of ideas, that’s a problem.”

School district learns a free speech lesson

What began as a demonstration against abortion in front of a Pennsylvania high school became a lesson in constitutionally protected free speech for Downingtown Area School District students and staff.

A Holocaust symposium at Downingtown West High School on April 21 offered an opportune venue for siblings Lauren and Conner Haines, ages 19 and 16, to share their views on another holocaust—the millions of lives lost to abortion. The homeschool students set out to that campus with the gospel message and three pro-life posters, including one with an image of an aborted baby. The pair stopped first on the public sidewalk outside the STEM Academy, down the street from their original destination, as students were being dismissed for the day.

During an 18-minute recorded encounter with STEM Academy Vice Principal Zach Ruff, he repeatedly told the siblings to leave, saying they and the babies represented on the poster could “go to hell.” At one point, Ruff attempted to grab the signs, an act of assault under Pennsylvania law. Students and parents witnessed the alleged verbal and physical assault.

Ruff’s actions earned him an unpaid suspension and ultimately cost him his job. The school district received a legal reproach of its own.

Attorneys for the Haines siblings sent a demand letter to the district asking officials to acknowledge Ruff violated the pair’s free speech rights. They should then communicate that acknowledgment to all district employees and, perhaps most importantly, the district’s students, some of whom indicated they agreed with Ruff’s actions, according to the letter.

The Downingtown Area School District replied July 14 to the Alliance Defending Freedom’s (ADF) letter acknowledging Ruff’s illegal actions and warning its employees that violating a student’s free speech rights can result in “discipline, including discharge.”

District employees will be required to review district policy and state board regulations on First Amendment rights. District administrators will also be required to read two articles about freedom of speech. Both articles are linked to Wikipedia, a website many high school and college students are not allowed to cite in their school research.

And the lesson learned by some observers? Government officials can shut down disagreeable speech.

In the demand letter, an ADF attorney said parents and students “followed Ruff’s example” by sending the Haineses hundreds of messages, some with threatening and vulgar language, “indicating they completely misunderstand the concept of free speech.”

“The hostility to the First Amendment by the next generation may be even more dangerous than that of a school official,” ADF attorney Kevin Theriot said in the letter. —Bonnie Pritchett

Second warning

ABC News has yet to respond to a retraction request by ADF related to the news agency’s labeling of the civil rights legal non-profit group as an “anti-LGBT hate group.” Without a retraction or admission that the label constituted opinion, not fact, ABC News continues to feed the narrative that news media cannot be trusted, said Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., in a July 31 letter to ABC News President James Goldston.

Lankford warned Goldston that his agency’s hyperbolic language in its coverage of U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ July 12 address to ADF attorneys and supporters “cannot be taken lightly.” ABC News reporters said the Southern Poverty Law Center came up with the moniker, but Lankford insists that does not absolve the reporters or their employer for using the factually unsubstantiated term.

SPLC cites ADF’s defense of Biblical marriage and speech rights related to human sexuality as the source of its so-called “hate.”

“Disagreement is not the same as discrimination and it’s not the same as hate. As journalists and members of the government, we have a responsibility to distinguish between the two,” Lankford wrote. —B.P.