Sunday, September 22, 2013
California college bars student from handing out copies of Constitution
The Constitution guarantees the right to free speech, but don’t try to pass out copies of it at Modesto Junior College in California.
A student at the school who tried to pass out pocket-size pamphlets of the very document that memorializes our rights got shut down on Sept. 17 – a date also known as Constitution Day.
Campus authorities told 25-year-old Robert Van Tuinen, who caught the whole thing on videotape, he could only pass out the free documents at a tiny designated spot on campus, and only then if he scheduled it several days in advance.
“Watching the video is a combination of depressing and nauseating, to see what rigamarole students have to go through just to express themselves on campus,” said Robert Shibley, senior vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which has taken on campus speech codes around the nation.
Van Tuinen, who said he’d read up on the school’s regulations and expected to get chased away from outside the student center, went to FIRE with the video. The foundation penned an email letter to the school’s administration on Van Tuinen’s behalf early Thursday, but Shibley said there had been no response later in the day.
A spokeswoman for the college tells FoxNews.com that students and the general public are permitted to pass out materials in areas on campus that are generally available to the public, as long as they do not disrupt the orderly operations of the college.
"In the case of the YouTube video, it does not appear that the student was disrupting the orderly operations of the college and therefore we are looking into the incident," Modesto Junior College Marketing and Public Relations officer Linda Hoile said.
In the video, Van Tuinen is confronted by an unidentified campus police officer within minutes of passing out the pamphlets. When he protests, he is told “there are rules.”
“But do you know what this is?” he asks. “What are the rules? Why are the rules tied to my free speech?”
"It was a tense situation," Van Tuinen, who is from Modesto, told FoxNews.com. "To be told I can't do something as basic as handing out the Constitution was frustrating."
Eventually, the police officer escorts Van Tuinen into an administrative office, where an unidentified woman shows him a binder with rules she says govern free speech on campus
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6 comments:
"To conquer a nation without the use of military force, you must first control the minds of their young..." -- Karl Marx
Every US veteran that fought for freedom did so in vain. Every US soldier that now fights for freedom does so for a lie.
Free speech with rules is not free speech.
According to the source article one college rule has afree speech area that must be scheduled several days in advance. That leads one to wonder if the content also has to be allowed.
Then we read: "A spokeswoman for the college tells FoxNews.com that students and the general public are permitted to pass out materials in areas on campus that are generally available to the public, as long as they do not disrupt the orderly operations of the college."
It appears that some employees don't know the rule book. Obviously neither the security officer or the 'unidentified woman' don't.
The "free speech zone" was probably far from the student center where all the students congregate. Anyway, the presence of a "free speech zone" implies that the rest of the campus is a non free speech zone!
This is the communist utopia of Mexifornia, where the Constitution is only valid when it protects the furtherance of the Leftist agenda.
It is no longer part of the "New America", which will be reserved for (real) Americans (only), and where all others will enter at their own risk.
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