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“Constitutional rights do not mature and come into being magically only when one attains the state-defined age of majority. Minors, as well as adults, are protected by the Constitution and possess constitutional rights.”
–Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, Planned Parenthood v. Danforth, 1976.
The student government at the University of West Georgia is looking to cut funding to the school’s student newspaper in retaliation for an opinion piece that mocked fraternities.
The day after the West Georgian ran a column called “Join a Frat with Buck Futter, Jr.” student body president Alan Webster — a fraternity brother himself — introduced a bill that would freeze the paper’s funds on a “temporary yet immediate” basis while the university explored alternative ways to “allocat[e] institutional funds to extend interesting, informative, accurate, and responsible information in a manner that sheds a positive light on the University.”
The bill was passed by the student government and is being reviewed by university lawyers prior to implementation.
The offending column described frat members as “over-aggressive alcoholics that have no sense of responsibility,” and said that the university repeatedly lets “frats off the hook despite their incessant rule-breaking and idiotic antics.” It claims that frat members keyed the word “FAG” into the finish of a Resident Assistant’s car, and went unpunished “because University Police never actually investigate any crimes against students.”
It also suggests that UWG fraternity members regularly have sex with each other and rape passed-out female students.
Perennial presidential-campaign asterisk Alan Keyes was one of twenty-two anti-choice activists arrested on the Notre Dame campus yesterday. The group, which included Operation Rescue founder/sleazeball Randall Terry, was protesting President Obama’s upcoming commencement address.
The group was arrested for trespassing — Notre Dame policy allows only “student-led protests” on campus, and apparently this group couldn’t (or didn’t care to) find any student supporters.
But that’s not my favorite part of the story. My favorite part of the story is this: When Keyes walked onto campus, he was pushing a blood-spattered doll in a stroller…
A Spongebob Squarepants stroller.
Update: Photo from here. Note that the doll was so small and unobtrusive that the (“pro-life,” but disgusted anyway) blogger who posted it thinks that Keyes was pushing a bloody Spongebob doll in the stroller. Note also that commenter Leslie Hanks actually approves of parading around with bloody Spongebob dolls as an anti-abortion tactic.
An Entertainment Weekly blog claimed last week that a New York crowd “staged a ’60s-style sit-in at a Manhattan KFC” after the restaurant ran out of the grilled chicken that Oprah Winfrey had given away free coupons for online. The story has been repeated over and over again since.
But the sit-in never happened.
The EW story was based on a Gothamist post, and Gothamist got it from an anonymous emailer who’d written to say that customers at a midtown Manhattan KFC were “currently holding a sit-in and refusing to leave until they get their free chicken.” But that email was an obvious, crude, and not particularly funny joke — it went on to claim that the store’s “manager ran from [a] screaming horde” who were “spew[ing] racial epithets” and threatening other patrons with “a beatdown.”
If there had been an actual sit-in the New York tabloids and television news would have been all over it, but a Google news search for KFC protest Oprah “New York” brings up not a single hit from local media. It gets plenty of hits, but they’re all to stories that were based on the Gothamist’s joke.
Were people at that KFC upset about missing out on the promotion? Some of them probably were. Any time a business promises a free giveaway and fails to deliver there are going to be some pissed off customers, particularly if they’ve been waiting in line for a while.
But the crucial element of the Gothamist/EW story is the sit-in angle, and it’s obvious why. Claiming that there was a sit-in brings all the racially coded elements of the story — Oprah, fast food, New York, fried chicken — together, and turns a story about corporate bungling into a story about race. Gothamist cast the story as a story about angry, violent blacks, while EW went for a more sardonic approach, but both made the incident into a morality play with blackness taking center stage.
And so it was inevitable that white racist idiots would pounce on the story, just as it was inevitable that blacks would recoil in embarrassment. But there’s no reason for anyone to be smirking, and there’s no reason for anyone to be cringing.
The sit-in never happened.
Eight Venezuelan police officers have been arrested in connection with the shooting death of student activist Yuban Ortega Urdaneta two weeks ago. The charges against the officers include homicide.
Ortega, a supporter of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez and the president of the student association of the University Technical Institute of Ejido, was reportedly shot in the forehead during a campus protest against university corruption on April 28. He died of his wounds three days later.
The shooting of Ortega sparked three days of student riots in the city of Mérida, just north of the Ejido campus. In a television appearance after Ortega’s death, president Chavez said that “the full weight of the law must fall” on whoever was responsible.
studentactivism.net 
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