If You're Losing Badly, You Don't Get To Make Radical Demands About The Terms Of The Debate
I mean, you *can*, but where will it get you?
The New York Times just ran an interesting article by Vimal Patel headlined “At Berkeley Law, a Debate Over Zionism, Free Speech and Campus Ideals.” It starts, as so many good stories do, with a Jewish person swearing:
On the first day of the fall semester, Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, learned that a student group created a bylaw that banned supporters of Zionism from speaking at its events.
Mr. Chemerinsky said he rarely used profanity but did so in that moment. As a constitutional law scholar and co-author of a book about campus free speech, Mr. Chemerinsky said that he knew the group, the Berkeley chapter of Law Students for Justice in Palestine, had the legal right to exclude speakers based on their views.
But he also knew the bylaw, which eight other student groups also adopted, would be polarizing within the law school and used as a cudgel by forces outside of it.
This has indeed become a source of viral outrage. As Patel notes, “Kenneth L. Marcus, the civil rights chief of the U.S. Education Department during the Trump administration, wrote about the bylaw in September in The Jewish Journal under the explosive headline ‘Berkeley Develops Jewish Free Zones.’” (Even Chemerinsky, who is no fan of the policy, said that article was “inflammatory and distorted.”)
There doesn’t appear to be much of an actual constitutional question here. Student groups at a public university can — and should be able to — discriminate on the basis of viewpoint in this manner. Patel writes: “True, [Chemerinsky] said, many Jews view Zionism as integral to their identity, but such deep passions do not change the law.” That hasn’t prevented some overwrought and counterproductive saber-rattling on the part of politicians, among them a pair of Democratic congressmen who threatened to withhold funding from or investigate the groups that adopted the policy, but these efforts seem unlikely to go anywhere.
I find this story interesting because it reflects a common occurrence: A group of lefties who hold an unpopular view — or at least a view that certainly isn’t “winning” in any meaningful sense — attempting to cleanse their own space of any disagreement with it.
This is dumb. If your side is losing, you don’t get to make radical demands about the terms of the debate! I mean, you can, but it’s not going to help you.
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