How not to call someone’s First Amendment credentials into question, part I

Let the UNC-Wilmington Seahawk demonstrate in its staff editorial entitled “The Pope Foundation and free speech: The new Pot and Kettle“¹ (the footnotes are, I’ve decided, the best way to approach this without interrupting the flow of irony):

So the Pope Foundation² is criticizing free speech.³ ? This is the same organization that, out of the goodness of their hearts, paid for a Christian fraternity to sue UNC-Chapel Hill for refusing to recognize an organization that discriminates based on religion.⁴

They also helped a student go after UNC-CH when in an e-mail, a professor criticized the comments the student made in her class. Where was the Pope Foundation when the professor’s First Amendment rights were being violated?⁵ …

A few items:

1. “Pot and kettle” are supposed to refer to two things that are marked by the same (generally negative) distinction ? i.e., the pot calling the kettle ‘black.’ It’s obvious what the Seahawk wishes to say, negatively, about the Pope Center (see note 2). Nevertheless, because of comically poor editing, the truth came out: the Pope Center does share the same distinction of favoring liberty as free speech. Thank you, O ye unwitting ironists.

2. The fledgling journalists habitually confuse the Pope Foundation, the philanthropy that supports the Pope Center as well as universities across the state, with the Pope Center, the liberty-loving think tank.

3. The Pope Center is criticizing the lack of free speech at UNCW. Again the editors fail to make a key distinction.

4. That is, the Pope Center supported the First Amendment rights of the students (individuals protected by the First Amendment) against a public university (a governmental organization bound by the First Amendment) whose chancellor defended its actions on the wrongheaded notion that there is a “tension” between the First Amendment and the Fourteenth, which UNC-Chapel Hill needed to “balance” (by completely subjugating First Amendment rights). Nowhere do the editors exhibit any comprehension at all of those crucial facts.

5. This representation is so ignorant as to seem willfully malicious. I would remind the editors that the teacher singled the student out by name in a classwide email, accused him of making violent hate speech (go here for particulars), which she said was a “perfect example” of what “a white, heterosexual, [C]hristian male” would be expected to say. She then intimated that he ought to “feel marked or threatened or vulnerable” for saying what he did. I would remind the Seahawk of the rather significant fact that the Office of Civil Right ruled that the teacher had harassed and discriminated against the student on the basis of race and sexual orientation.

If the Seahawk wishes to opine in favor of racial and sexual harassment and discrimination by those vested with authority by the government, by all means proceed (in the proud tradition of Pravda and Granma), but don’t insult your readers’ intelligence by saying you’re doing so in the name of free speech.