A community college that is accused of trying to censor conservative opinions on campus has drawn a lawsuit for its agenda.
Officials with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Express say they have sued California’s Clovis Community College on behalf of several conservative students.
FIRE charges that public colleges cannot ban students’ flyers because administrators subjectively dislike their political viewpoints.
FIRE represents students from a campus chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, who had tried to hand out flyers with their opinions.
“Clovis tried to put up barriers against our ideas because administrators didn’t like them,” said YAF-Clovis founder Alejandro Flores. “But that’s the opposite of what a college should do. Our college should encourage us to discuss and sharpen our ideas, not shut down the conversation.”
It was last fall that Alejandro and fellow club members Daniel Flores and Juliette Colunga obtained permission from college officials to hang three flyers on bulletin boards that also are used by a wide range of other interests.
The opinions posted advocated for freedom – and they listed the death tolls of various communist regimes.
A public records request revealed that one Clovis school administrator volunteered he “gladly” would take the flyers down and censor the students’ perspectives because someone had complained about their message.
Cited was a school policy stating, “Posters with inappropriate or offense (sic) language or themes are not permitted…”
FIRE explained how the school officials next manipulated the truth to have the flyers removed.
“On Nov. 12, Clovis President Lori Bennett personally ordered the flyers removed. After doing so, she searched for a reason to justify the viewpoint discrimination, inventing a brand new rule requiring flyers to double as club announcements,” FIRE reported.
Bennett actually wrote, “If you need a reason, you can let them know that [we] agreed they aren’t club announcements.”
However, FIRE pointed out, “Clovis does not have a policy on the books that requires flyers to be club announcements. But with this excuse in hand, Clovis employees told student workers to remove the flyers.”
Officials then used their “pretextual justification” to banish other flyers that had been approved earlier to a “rotting ‘free speech kiosk'” in a remote part of the campus.
“By relegating the flyers to a tiny kiosk, Clovis administrators tried to ensure that YAF’s opinions would never reach the rest of campus,” explained FIRE lawyer Jeff Zeman. “But FIRE’s here to amplify the voices that censors try to silence and make sure that all Clovis students are heard.”
The organization advocating for students pointed out that public colleges, like Clovis, are required to follow the First Amendment, under which it is unconstitutional to treat student groups differently based on their viewpoints.
“Free speech is under attack on campuses across the nation, and the recent improper action by Clovis Community College constitutes yet another disappointing example,” said Young America’s Foundation President Gov. Scott Walker. “By attempting to stifle the speech of the conservative students in our Young Americans for Freedom chapter, Clovis administrators engaged in unlawful censorship in violation of the First Amendment.”
The lawsuit is against the college president and other officials, and seeks to change an unconstitutional policy and hold officials “personally accountable for violating students’ clearly established free speech rights.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: During the Biden era of rapidly metastasizing madness, the greatest madness of all may be today’s shockingly widespread campaign to indoctrinate, seduce, groom and flat-out RECRUIT America’s children into the dark world of transgenderism. Countless LGBT activists, including many public-school teachers, have taken to proselytizing the new transgender salvation to America’s children, both on social media and within the schools themselves. Even Biden’s far-left Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra fully supports taxpayer-funded amputations of healthy body parts of these vulnerable children, declaring ghoulishly, “We should help those have the life-affirming care that they need.” The result? Untold numbers of America’s kids are being led into lives of not just unending conflict, confusion, suffering, deformity and disability, but far too often – as multiple studies prove – suicide. The whole unbelievable story – including the underlying reasons, almost entirely unreported elsewhere, for what amounts to the most massive child sexual abuse campaign in American history – is explored as never before in the July issue of WND’s critically acclaimed Whistleblower magazine, titled “WHAT’S REALLY BEHIND THE TRANSGENDER CRAZE?”
For 25 years, WND has boldly brought you the news that really matters. If you appreciate our Christian journalists and their uniquely truthful reporting and analysis, please help us by becoming a WND Insider!
Content created by the WND News Center is available for re-publication without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected].
SUPPORT TRUTHFUL JOURNALISM. MAKE A DONATION TO THE NONPROFIT WND NEWS CENTER. THANK YOU!
This article was originally published by the WND News Center.
