Conservatives sue because university allowed free speech...and lose!

The University of California, Santa Cruz, has a policy of equal access for military recruiters.

And - from this story - it also appears that UC Santa Cruz is a little more friendly to free speech than some of America's other institutions of higher book-learnin'.

So, when antiwar students peacefully protested the recruiters' efforts to lure schoolmates into fighting in Bush's war, the activists were largely tolerated by the school. An effort was made to silence them, but I recall this suppression being carried out primarily by the Pentagon rather than school administrators.

What's the university's reward for being relatively tolerant of dissent?

Why, it becomes the subject of a lawsuit, of course.

Got that? When right-wing school systems suppress free speech, the victims are told they have no case. But when a school actually allows free speech, it gets sued pell-mell to court.

In this case, it's unclear if the university was actually named as a defendant. Rather, the federal government was sued because it failed to pull the university's funding for allowing the protests.

You can't make this shit up, people.

The suit was filed by Young America's Foundation, which calls itself the "principal outreach arm of the conservative movement." YAF said that by allowing the protests, UC Santa Cruz was denying equal access by military recruiters.

And this, according to YAF, violates the hated Solomon Amendment that passed in the mid-'90s.

The Solomon Amendment was an attempt by right-wing members of Congress to control the politics of universities - and punish those that didn't toe the party line. If a university didn't want the military recruiting students to fight in a war, it would lose federal funding. The Bush regime later expanded this policy.

But that point is moot, as UC Santa Cruz did not bar the recruiters. YAF's argument is that by allowing recruiters and antiwar students the same access, it's chasing the recruiters away.

But now the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington has laughed that argument clean out of the courtroom.

I don't even need to tell you that YAF's lawsuit was about stifling the antiwar activists' free speech. Nothing more. If you pay even minimal attention to the news, you know that.

Hey YAF, why don't you sue a university like NKU that has shown time and time again that it's hell-bent on suppressing free speech?

(Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/27/BAJL18VT3D.DTL&tsp=1)