- At Crooks and Liars, Frances Langum, the artist formerly known as Blue Gal, goes shoopin fleurpty!
- The Big Empty has excellent advice for Democrats.
- nojo at Stinque provides 10 ways we all can recognize that the apocalypse is upon us.
- Last Of The Millenniums looks into North Carolina’s new bathroom law and reports on the real meaning.
- At Wisconsin Watchdog.org, James Wigderson brings forth a controversy at Marquette University. Seems students sometimes help pay for post-graduate education by serving as part-time instructors. One was holding a classroom discussion about philosopher John Rawls. She reportedly stopped an extended interruption by a student who wanted to talk at length about his opposition to gay marriage. She promised to hold that discussion in a later class, and did.
A political science professor was later told about the incident and accused her of closing off free discussion because it might disturb other students. He attacked her for violating the student’s free speech rights, providing her name in an article on a conservative blog site. She became the target of email attacks from all over. The professor apparently has a history of attacking students in print, identifying them by name. There were other incidents. Marquette University suspended him.
James recounts the situation and concludes that it is an issue of free speech and tenure rights: that of the suspended professor.
It might be an issue of university policy that prohibits public attacks by professors on students in which their names are used, but James doesn’t get into that.
James may also have space limitations. He does not have room to mention the fact that the class was on a separate topic, the offer to hold the discussion later, that the promise was kept, that the instructor was a student, or the previous attacks on other students.
A little unusual for James.
One thought on “Democrats Advised, Bathrooms, End of World, Free Speech”
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I’m having trouble imagining a good Rawlsian argument against gay marriage. If we were all behind a veil of ignorance, would we not prefer that gay marriage be legal, just in case we were neither heterosexual nor members of religions that condemn homosexuality? It might go the other way if gay marriage were harmful, but despite appeals to “the children” and “the nuclear family,” no one has been able to show that it is.