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The Miami Herald has a tantalizing article up on Guatemala’s Parade of Ridicule, a century-old student protest tradition that mixes political comment, satirical graffiti, drinking … and alleged masked extortion.
The Herald piece left me wanting to know more about this tradition, but a quick Google didn’t turn up any good English-language sources. Anyone have information to share?
The University of Maryland Diamondback has a strong editorial up this morning on the college’s porn film controversy. Excerpts:
This isn’t just about state legislators and free speech. University administrators’ decision-making process last week demonstrates how little regard they have for student input. […] Administrators might persuasively argue they won’t support hate-speech events that discriminate against a religious group or an ethnic group. In the same vein, they might have argued the canceled event would have degraded women.
But such a decision must be made in a public forum, with as wide a segment of stakeholders as can possibly be assembled. Deeming material inappropriate behind closed doors is the fast road toward truly unjust distributions of resources, and frankly, to discrimination. […]
It’s easy to devalue the precedent administrators have set in the context of a bunch of hormonal college students in a tizzy to see some skin. But what happens when federal funding for stem-cell research comes up? What happens when administrators decide whether a speaker on Israel or Palestine is engaging in hate speech? So grab your swords and muskets, mateys, because a decision this egregious can’t be quietly tolerated. It’s time to rock the boat.
The Student Power Party is still planning to hold a screening of the film and a free speech forum on campus tonight. No word yet on whether the administration will allow that event to take place.
First the distributors of the porn flick Pirates II grabbed the spotlight by offering their movie free of charge for screenings on college campuses.
Then Republicans in the Maryland state legislature grabbed the spotlight by threatening to cut government funding to any college that showed the movie.
Now candidates for the University of Maryland’s student government are grabbing the spotlight by screening the movie on campus in defiance of an administration veto.
The Student Power Party, a slate running in student government elections scheduled for this Tuesday and Wednesday, have announced that they will be running Pirates II in a lecture hall on Monday night — election eve. They’ll be holding a forum on free speech before the show.
More information on the SPP can be found here, here, and here. They’ve also got a Twitter account and a pretty good campaign ad.
Monday morning update: Here’s the latest on SPP’s plans for tonight, from the UM Diamondback.
(This is part three of a four-part series. Parts one and two are here and here.)
The posting at the NSIE site said that the April 1 action was going to kick off at “the 12th Street building” at 2 o’clock. It didn’t give an address.
I Googled up a campus map without too much trouble, though. The New School only has two buildings on 12th Street, it turns out, and since one of them is a dorm, I figured I was looking for the other one. I’d previously arranged to meet someone on the Lower East Side at three o’clock, so I planned to hang around for the first half hour or so of the NSIE event before heading across town.
Iowa’s supreme court has unanimously granted legal recognition to same-sex marriages!
More cool details:
- The ruling will take effect on April 24, three weeks from today.
- Two of the justices behind the unanimous opinion were appointed by Republicans.
- The decision is based on the Iowa state constitution, so it cannot be appealed to any other court.
- It appears that the earliest the decision could be overturned by constitutional amendment is November 2012.
- Such an amendment would require approval by the Iowa state legislature prior to a popular referendum.
The majority leaders of both houses of the state legislature can be expected to oppose any effort to overturn the decision by constitutional amendment — they released a joint statement today hailing the ruling as an example of “Iowa common sense and Iowa common decency.”
It’s been a long, long time coming, but I know … a change is gonna come.
studentactivism.net 
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