Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Fighting for the right to harass

Georgia Tech settles lawsuit by Republican group to harass others. With limitations on harassment, how is a Republican to communicate? From Inside Higher Ed:

Two officers of the campus’s College Republican group sued Georgia Tech in March, saying that officials at the public institution had impaired the students’ free speech rights by shutting down their “affirmative action” bake sale and by limiting their efforts to protest against “The Vagina Monologues,” among other things. The Alliance Defense Fund, a legal advocacy group that represented the students, argued in its complaint in Sklar v. Clough that Georgia Tech officials had based their actions against the students on the institute’s residence hall policies, which defined a series of “acts of intolerance” that were banned under the policy.

Most objectionable to the student plaintiffs were provisions in the policy that restricted “any attempt to injure, harm, malign or harass a person because of race, religious belief, color, sexual/affectional orientation,” and any “denigrating written/verbal communication ... directed toward an individual because of their characteristics or beliefs.” The lawsuit defined those provisions as overbroad and “draconian.”

4 comments:

MT said...

Dollars to donuts the choice to settle had little to do with the either the perceived chance of winning in court or the cost of litigating.

Anonymous said...

You don't know

Anonymous said...

Get the real facts. These women were told they did not have the same rights as other groups on campus. What's more, they've been threatened with violence and harassed about everything from their appearance to their ethnicity on campus, a fact that the liberal media chooses to ignore. Also, groups that oppose both women -- not their beliefs, but the women themselves --have formed on campus and are spreading hatred. The administration did nothing to stop it.

helmut said...

Wow. So a group that is harrassed and threatened with violence protests university rules against harrassment and violence, sues, and gets changes to university policy that water down harrassment rules? And all of it goes unreported in the liberal Georgia media?

If you're right, JT, then the Republican group seems not to know what they're doing. But I suspect you don't know the story (read the university rule changes provided in the link) because that makes no sense at all. Anti-women groups on campus aren't going to be checked by watered down regulations, which is what the group sued for. Nutty.