Comments on: Anti-gay college student sues school

By: evan

evan — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 22:36:39 +0000

yet again, another occurance of religion being brought up. we need to separate religion from college, politics, etc. everyone is entitled to their own rights but dont bring your god into the conversation. god loves gays.

By: Clicky

Clicky — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 01:43:41 +0000

They… DO realize that, unless the specific paper requires it, biblical verses are NOT allowed for research topics? Heck, I learned that the hard way when trying to pull near the same thing in my class, only I was on the other side. <3

By: SteveMD2

SteveMD2 — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 08:26:03 +0000

The point is that this kid was not in a religion class, but he was almost certainly catholic. And poisoned.

The prof should have followed up this assignment with a forum on the history of religious hatred, and and it’s impact on societies.

And as someonr else said, maybe the speech was done on purpose to engender the conditions for a lawsuit.

One of The Christian talibans holy grails is the fear that their hate speech will be outlawed. As it is in much of Europe after the destruction of WWII. Which was enabled by the churches long term hatred of Jews that gave hitler the lever to gain total power.

And I wonder what the ADA would say when next door to them an Extremist muslim group started an enormous mosque, and started saying the same things that the ADA types support, but replacing the word “gay” with “christian”. How about outlawing christian marriage for one. They’d squeal like a stuck pig.

Oh, if I only knew the right people to make that happen.

By: Anna

Anna — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 18:51:29 +0000

The issue isn’t about the student’s topic so much as it is about his right to free speech being taken away. You wouldn’t want to be cut off in the middle of a speech where you were giving reasons why homosexual marriage should be allowed. The issue is that it wasn’t constitutional for the kid to have his rights taken from him; not whether or not his topic was acceptable to everyone.

By: Wesley

Wesley — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:57:06 +0000

Whether or not the professor committed a First Amendment violation, his comments were out of line. Being rude to a student in front of the class is not going to change anybody’s mind about gay marriage. He just made an ass of himself.

By: Kari

Kari — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 20:46:11 +0000

Nicholas: When you are a child, that’s somewhat true, because children don’t have ‘free speech’ in the Constitutional sense. However, we are talking about a college here, where the students are adults and have all of the Constitutional protections and freedoms.

By: Gerry Fisher

Gerry Fisher — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 18:53:58 +0000

>I still stand by my initial question – what would have happened if a student stood up and made a speech that put down black, hispanics, jews or muslims?

I would think that, since this was a public speaking class, you could use academic tenants of public speaking to judge the speech, NOT belief in the content. If someone gives a hate filled speech, then, as a professor or classmate, I’d have a lot of questions about who the audience for this kind of speech would be, what the speaker hoped to accomplish, logical inconsistencies, and so on. I would think there’d be plenty of ways to trash the speech without going at the content. Why? Because hate is illogical and probably violates the tenants of good speech making (which is what the class was *supposed* to be about).

By: Gerry Fisher

Gerry Fisher — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 18:47:30 +0000

I hate it when our friends give our enemies ammunition. The professor was dead wrong.

By: Nicholas

Nicholas — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 14:10:06 +0000

I’ve always been told that my freedom of speech rights don’t extend to the classroom. There have been several cases about this, and I’m pretty sure the students always lose.

By: Kari

Kari — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:39:35 +0000

Community colleges are publicly-subsidized by the community that they in. The ‘fascist’ certainly has a leg to stand on in terms of his case, and I expect that he will win on Freedom of Speech grounds.

That said, we are talking about California and there may be hate speech legislation on the books that could come into play in this issue as well.

Regardless, the professor’s behavior was totally unprofessional, and if I was the dean of the college I would consider firing him.