You are currently browsing Angus Johnston’s articles.
The nine members of the American River College student government who voted to endorse California’s anti- same-sex marriage Proposition 8 have survived the recall vote that attempted to remove them from office.
The vote in the recall election was nearly seven times as high as the vote that brought the student government to office — 3,531 votes, as opposed to about five hundred — but still amounted to only nine percent of the ARC student body. Each of the student government members received about 53-54% of the vote in the recall.
With the presidential election shaping up as an Obama blowout in California this year, the biggest issue on the November ballot there is Proposition 8, a measure that would overturn the state court’s recent ruling in favor of same-sex marriage.
Polls show California voters equally divided on Prop 8, and the campaign is dividing the students at American River College (ARC), a Sacramento-area community college, as well.
On September 30, the ARC student government voted 8-3 to endorse Proposition 8, and anti-8 students immediately set to work gathering signatures for a recall election to remove the pro-8 representatives from office. The recall election was held earlier this week, and votes are still being counted.
The recall highlights low voter turnout in student government elections. According to one source, only 300 students voted in the last election at ARC, a college of over 37,000 students.
Five of the representatives facing recall are Christian students from the former Soviet Union, and controversy has arisen over dual-language flyers distributed during the recall effort on behalf of those students.
One blogger had the Russian text of a flyer translated, and found that where the English-language side of the handout asked “Does responding to Student requests by passing a resolution endorsing Prop 8 (Marriage Protection Amendment) make them ‘incompetent’ or unqualified for Office?”, the Russian-language side bore this message:
Stop homosexuals! They want to silence the voices of the believers and the Slavs in our college and they want to take the light from everyone who supports marriages!
When I was in Minneapolis giving my talk last weekend, I mentioned one of my favorite books on American students: Sex in the Heartland
A lot of folks at the conference were interested in what I had to say about Bailey’s work, and a number of them asked me for information about the book, so if you click the link above, it’ll take you to a page where you can order Sex in the Heartland through Amazon. It’s a great book, and I very much recommend it.
US Representative Christopher Smith, a fourteen-term New Jersey Republican, has tuition troubles.
His daughter attends the University of Virginia, and the family is saving $20,000 a year by claiming her as a VA resident — UVA’s out-of-state tuition is $14,500 a semester.
Smith’s opponent, Joshua Zeitz, was quick to jump on the revelation, saying through a spokesperson that Rep. Smith’s decision to seek in-state tuition shows “that after 28 years in Washington, he has a sense of entitlement, he thinks he’s entitled to things average folks aren’t entitled to and he ends up spending all of his life in Herndon, Va.”
Oops.
“Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.”
–John Maynard Keynes
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments