Court upholds awful Solomon Amendment

For years, one of my pet peeves with the way the ruling party conducts itself has been the fact that, under the Contract With America, the federal government began requiring educational institutions to toe the party line. I've pleaded, I've begged, I've implored people to look at what's going on - only to be told there's no way it can be happening because Newt/Lott/BushAmerica is the freest country in the history of the world.

Welp, here's the perfect example of exactly what I've been talking about: the Solomon Amendment. According to the all-powerful Wikipedia, the Solomon Amendment was enacted in 1996 by the insufferable 104th Congress, which in my view makes it null and void under the Spittle Doctrine. Even if it didn't, I think the law is clearly unconstitutional just based on what it says.

The Solomon Amendment was sponsored by the late Gerald Solomon, ultraconservative Republican congressman from upstate New York. It requires the government to discriminate against colleges that fail to give military and ROTC recruiters the same access as nonmilitary agencies and private employers. Under this illegal law, the government has to deny all federal money - even research grants - to schools that bar military recruitment on campus.

So if your college decides that having the military recruit students to fight Bush's wars doesn't fit the school's mission, then your school is out of luck. It either has to lose all its funding or let the recruiters on campus - no matter how much it conflicts with the school's stance. This became an even more serious issue when it was discovered that having military recruiters on campus violates school policies that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation (as the military disallows gays from openly serving). In other words, Congress in effect prohibited colleges from banning discrimination against gays.

With Congress policing the beliefs of colleges all over the land, you'd think it couldn't get much worse. But lo! It did. In 2001, with Bush's boot planted firmly in the nation's spine, Congress made it so that if a college that's part of a larger university bans recruiters, the entire university loses its funding.

A federal court later found the Solomon Amendment unconstitutional - but, believe it or not, the Supreme Court later reversed that decision. Why they did, I'll never know.

Now there's been another challenge to the Solomon Amendment. Yale Law School has been trying for years to halt military recruiters at its job fairs. But then the Bush regime announced it would withhold $350,000,000 a year from Yale University unless its law school did exactly what the recruiters wanted - so Yale took 'em to court. Last month, a federal appeals court ruled against Yale by upholding the Solomon Amendment.

So Yale now has no choice but to buckle under, because it's already clear where the Supreme Court stands. The ruling regime got its way. Again.

Most of the federal money Yale gets is for medical and scientific research. You read that right: The Bush regime was willing to impede medicine and science all because of politics.

If the federal government can bully Yale and control what it does, just think how badly it can push around less prestigious schools. Ivy League universities aren't exactly my field, but the more important issue is that the villains of the Republican Right are now able to just dictate politics to every institution of higher book-learnin' in America - from the most selective university to the most open community college. And they do this even after they claimed to be for local control and smaller government. The irony never ceases to amaze and anger.

(Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/nyregion/01yale.html)