Political Correctness | Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion - Part 15
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Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 08, 2014 4 Comments
S. Truett Cathy, the founder of Chick-fil-A, died today at the age of 93. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Mr. Cathy, an entrepreneur from an early age, built Chick-fil-A from a small diner founded in an Atlanta suburb 68 years ago into the top fast-food chicken chain in the U.S. Known for its grounding in the tenets of the founder's religious devotion as well as for its fried-chicken sandwiches, the closely held company has expanded to more than 1,800 stores in 40 states. Its sales have grown for 47 straight years, to $5 billion last year, Chick-fil-A says.... After some early setbacks, Mr. Cathy invented the original Chick-fil-A sandwich in 1964, considered to be the first fast-food chicken sandwich, and opened the company's first restaurant in Atlanta in 1967, according to a timeline on the company's website. He expanded the company in part by setting his restaurants in suburban shopping malls. Throughout, Mr. Cathy emphasized Christian values. The chain's locations are closed on Sundays and play religious-themed music. Mr. Cathy founded a youth-ministry organization, WinShape Foundation, in 1984, which provides leadership training and college scholarships to young people. Through the foundation, 13 foster homes have been created to provide long-term care for foster children in a family setting.
Chick-fil-A drew attention when activist groups and local politicians tried to force Chick-fil-A out of some cities because of its founding family's views on marriage and charitable donations. There never was an allegation of discrimination in the workplace -- this was pure political retribution, a precursor to purges such as that against Brendan Eich. We had extensive coverage of the anti-Chick-fil-A movement, including these posts: The anti-Chick-fil-A protests turned ugly at times, as Anne's video showed when this street preacher wa "chaulked":
We covered Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day with many reader pictures, such as these:

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on September 06, 2014 71 Comments
This is a thing that's actually happening at Columbia University in New York City. Rather than taking her allegations of rape to local law enforcement, Emma Sulkowicz has decided to carry around her mattress as long as her alleged rapist remains on campus. Sulkowicz didn't report the rape immediately after it happened, but was convinced to report the alleged incident months later. The case was ultimately dismissed by university authorities. According to the Columbia Spectator:

As long as her alleged rapist goes to Columbia, Emma Sulkowicz, CC ’15, plans on carrying a navy blue, extra-long twin-sized mattress wherever she goes.

Entitled “Carry That Weight,” the mattress is both the visual art major’s senior thesis and a step in her journey to come to terms with her experience. Over the past year, Sulkowicz has become a prominent critic of the University’s sexual assault adjudication policies, retelling her story to various administrators and media organizations to raise awareness.

“The past year of my life has been really marked by telling people what happened in that most intimate and private space,” Sulkowicz said, referring to the dorm bed where she was allegedly raped on the second night of her sophomore year.

“I was raped in my own dorm bed and since then, that space has become fraught for me. I feel like I’ve carried the weight of what happened there since then,” she added.

Months after her alleged rape, Emma reported the incident to the school. Her case, one of three individual complaints filed against the same student, was closed, and her rapist found “not responsible.” She appealed, but it was denied and the decision was upheld.

Sulkowicz has turned what she says was a horrible tragedy into performance art.

Performance art that will suffice as her senior thesis. A fact I'll just leave there without commenting on further:

Sulkowicz plead her case to the university. But why didn't she go to the police?

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 29, 2014 42 Comments
Last March we covered how California Seeks to Redefine Consensual Campus Sex as Rape, and we asked the question: "How does classifying most consensual sex as rape help rape victims?" It doesn't, of course. The California affirmative consent legislation was not about preventing rapes or other sexual assaults, which already are crimes, but about redefining inter-personal relationships in accordance with radical feminist demands which always view the female as victim of the male patriarchy. The affirmative consent obligation now is on the verge of becoming law (emphasis added):
To address the problem of rape on campuses, California colleges and universities would have to adopt a standard of unambiguous consent among students engaging in sexual activity under a proposal passed by state lawmakers Thursday. If signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, such policies would be required at all public colleges and other institutions that receive state funds for student aid. They would have to include a detailed protocol for assisting victims of sexual assault, stalking, domestic violence and date violence.... Students engaging in sexual activity would first need "affirmative consent" from both parties — a clear threshold that specifically could not include a person's silence, a lack of resistance or consent given while intoxicated.
Campus relationship regulation now is about the predominance of "rape culture" theory which ensnares men into kangaroo campus courts, and even opposes objective preventative measures, like "Undercover Colors" nail polish that reacts to date-rape drugs. The normal sequence of romantic interaction now is a violation of law unless there is something more than objectively willing conduct. It's no longer "against our will," but rather, a matter of procedural steps imposed on willing, consensual participants in order to avoid creating a crime where none exists:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 27, 2014 29 Comments
In Rotherham, England, a group of Pakistani immigrants and others of Pakistani descent deliberately targeted white teenage girls for sexual exploitation, with a religious angle to the targeting. The authorities knew of the exploitation, but were fearful of talking about it or going public with it for fear of being called racist or Islamophobic. So the abuse continued for over a decade, with approximately 1400 girls gang raped and otherwise sexually abused. It's all detailed in The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham, 1997 - 2013 (embedded at bottom of this post) released on August 21.  From the report: Rotherham Child Exploitation Cover
No one knows the true scale of child sexual exploitation (CSE) in Rotherham over the years. Our conservative estimate is that approximately 1400 children were sexually exploited over the full Inquiry period, from 1997 to 2013.... It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered. They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated. There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators.... By far the majority of perpetrators were described as 'Asian' by victims, yet throughout the entire period, councillors did not engage directly with the Pakistani-heritage community to discuss how best they could jointly address the issue. Some councillors seemed to think it was a one-off problem, which they hoped would go away. Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.....
This has been in the British papers for days, with The Daily Mail leading the way:

Posted by Amy Miller on August 07, 2014 9 Comments
We've previously reported on the uneven playing field upon which campus sexual assault cases are tried. In the world of faux-egalitarian bureaucracy that is the university system, there seems to be little concern for the due process rights of the accused; but one new group is aiming to change that. Families Advocating for Campus Equality, or "FACE," is spearheaded by the mothers of several male students who were falsely accused of sexual assault while at their universities. They're working to change the standards by which students accused of sexual assault are "tried" by universities, and for good reason:
On the basis of a mere accusation, students have been suspended or expelled from school, have been denied their right to attorney representation and have been prohibited from confronting or questioning their accusers. Investigations conducted by college administrators are often faulty, relying on hear-say, rumor, and teenage gossip, while the “burden of proof” -- the amount of evidence necessary to render a finding of guilt -- has been expressly reduced from the more exacting “clear and convincing” to a mere “preponderance” of the evidence. In practice, what this all means is that a student, accused of, say, pilfering another student’s computer in a dormitory, would be entitled to a full and fair hearing with legal representation, a right to confront his accuser, and would be judged by the more exacting “clear and convincing” standard. So, too, for that matter, would someone standing accused of murder in a court of law, where the standard of proof would be “beyond a reasonable doubt.”. But when the accusation is of some variation of sexual misconduct on a college campus -- a charge that itself carries enormous life-altering consequences for the accused -- no such safeguards are afforded.
FACE has, of course, been accused of being "anti-woman" for having the audacity to demand equal justice, but the founders of the group vehemently deny this accusation:

Posted by Amy Miller on August 01, 2014 30 Comments
On July 30, 2014, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) helped introduce the "Campus Accountability and Safety Act," a bipartisan initiative aimed at forcing universities to address and curb the problem of sexual assault on college campuses. During a press conference Wednesday, the coalition pushing the Act emphasized problems with existing policies, saying that current federal law actually encourages universities to under report sexual assaults that occur on campus. In a summary distributed to the press and public, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) said that "[t]he bipartisan Campus Accountability and Safety Act will create incentives for schools to take proactive steps to protect their students and rid their campuses of sexual predators." The full breakdown of the Act states several key goals:
  1. Establish new campus resources and support services for student survivors
  2. Ensure minimum training standards for on-campus personnel
  3. Create new historic transparency requirements
  4. Increase campus accountability and coordination with law enforcement
  5. Establish enforceable Title IX penalties and stiffer penalties for Clery Act violations

Posted by William A. Jacobson on July 04, 2014 4 Comments
There is excellent article at See Thru Education by Robert Paquette, Hamilton College Professor of History, who also is a co-founder of The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. Previously, we have featured Prof. Paquette's battles with multicultural dogma on campus, Western Civilization driven off campus at Hamilton College. Prof. Paquette's post is How American Universities Assassinated the Fourth of July:
“American exceptionalism” would not become the whipping-bench of the professoriate until the last decades of the twentieth century, yet Americans from the first Independence Day onward, without the term in their lexicon, had a sense, somewhat mystical, but nonetheless deeply ingrained, of what might be called an orthodoxy, that their system of government exemplified by design a standard of moral rectitude that would not only bring peace and prosperity to themselves but serve as a liberating beacon light for oppressed people around the world....

Posted by Prudence Paine on June 30, 2014 29 Comments
Many people hearing talk of America's campus “rape culture” might be tempted to dismiss the overheated rhetoric as harmless. Despite little evidence "rape culture" exists, though, three recent roundtable discussions on campus sexual assault hosted by Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) showed that not only do some people absolutely believe a rape culture exists on college campuses, but the federal government is involved in policing the issue on campuses. The Department of Education mandates colleges to handle every single student sexual assault through internal quasi-legal proceedings, in which the school performs all the roles of investigator, prosecutor, judge, executioner and statistics compiler. From the perspective of accusers in campus sexual assault cases, they may very well prefer a quasi-legal adjudication of their complaints because it provides a much broader definition of sexual assault, a much lower burden of proof and an environment in which “student's rights” tend to be accuser's rights, with little emphasis on rights for the accused. For the accuser, it makes the alleged post-assault experience that much less stressful. From the accused's perspective, though, he's not gonna know what hit him.

Schools Play Law and Order: SVU

MSUMikeJunger-CSPAN-SexAssault Speaking amongst friendly colleagues last Monday at the third roundtable, Mike Jungers, the dean of students at Missouri State University, made the surprising statement that new investigation procedures of campus sexual assault were resulting in the alleged perpetrators agreeing to be interrogated without obtaining an attorney. He considered this to be a good thing.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on June 19, 2014 20 Comments
Some privileges are permissible topics for discussion on campus and in the media. For example, White Privilege is the obsession of some faculty and students. George Will pointed out that there is another privilege on campuses -- false or contrived claims of victim status.  Will did not argue that real victims, be it of actual racism or sexual assault, share some special privilege, but rather, that there are people who contrive or encourage others to falsely create victimhood where none exists. We see it in theories such as microaggression, where in the absence of proof of actual racism, critical race theorists find racism in routine everyday interactions where the participants do not even realize they are being "racist," much less have any racist intent. We see it in repeated instances of fake, self-inflicted "hate crimes" in which the victim is, in fact, the perpetrator. We also see it in the lowering of the standards of proof and definitions of what constitutes sexual assault. I think everyone agrees that sexual assault as used in the criminal law deserves condemnation and punishment. But colleges, under pressure from the Justice Department and supposedly feminist groups, have started using definitions of sexual assault that can reach absurd results.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on June 18, 2014 49 Comments
From WaPo:
The United States Patent and Trademark Office has canceled the Washington Redskins trademark registration, calling the football team’s name “disparaging to Native Americans.” The landmark case, which appeared before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, was filed on behalf of five Native Americans. It was the second time such a case was filed. “This victory was a long time coming and reflects the hard work of many attorneys at our firm,” said lead attorney Jesse Witten, of Drinker Biddle & Reath. Federal trademark law does not permit registration of trademarks that “may disparage” individuals or groups or “bring them into contempt or disrepute.” The ruling pertains to six different trademarks associated with the team, each containing the word “Redskin.”

Posted by William A. Jacobson on June 09, 2014 14 Comments
We covered the "tranny" controversy at the University of Chicago in the Saturday Night Card Game, When everyone shuts up, we will have reached the “safe space”. The short story is that the student speech police attacked liberal gay activist Dan Savage for using the word "tranny" in discussing at a forum why he no longer uses the word "tranny."  More than that, they demanded that the word be banned from use at U. Chicago's Institute of Politics, where the event took place. Savage responded to the controversy (h/t Instapundit), by noting that the activists who attacked him refer to "trans" people as "it" -- a characterization Savage says is particularly offensive to the "trans" community.  I don't know if that's right or wrong, but it's a point. Andrew Sullivan writes, surveying this all this:
Yes, this occurred at the University of Chicago! Now, I’m not interested in defending Dan, because he can defend himself. And John Aravosis is right that there’s a potent and destructive strain in the LGBT world that aims more hate at someone like Dan Savage than at Rick Santorum (tell me about it). What I am interested is condemning this pathetic excuse for a student. This plea in a university to be free of hearing things that might hurt, offend, traumatize or upset you is an attack on the very idea of education itself. And don’t get me started about “trigger warnings.” So many things worth thinking about, grappling with, and chewing over can be offensive at first or second blush. That’s what a real education is about: offending your pre-existing feelings and prejudices with reason and argument and sometimes provocation. Education is not and never should be about making you more comfortable and more safe within your current worldview. It should not be about accusing someone with whom you might disagree of a hate crime.

Posted by Adam Kissel on June 07, 2014 12 Comments
Earlier this year the University College London student government, the UCL Union, banned the Nietzsche Club and resolved to prevent it from organizing on campus because the Union deemed Nietzsche, Heidegger, and other philosophers too “fascist” to tolerate. Yesterday morning here at Legal Insurrection, I called out the UCLU for claiming the study of Nietzsche is a direct threat to safety. (Here is an audio version of the post on YouTube.) Well, in a new statement last night, the UCLU Trustees responded. They have vowed to keep suppressing Nietzsche and “fascism” wherever they might find it. The Trustees are legally and morally bound by their promises to uphold such fundamental freedoms as free speech and freedom of assembly. Yet in their new statement, they stay on the attack: