The following is excerpted from the Church Newsroom. To read the full report, CLICK HERE.
With no opportunity to mount a defense, Maggie DeJong was banned by her university from speaking to three classmates because she expressed views those classmates opposed. With no defense of its own to mount when DeJong sued the school for violating her free speech rights, Southern Illinois University agreed to settle, paying her $80,000. The university also agreed to send its censoring officials to remedial First Amendment training taught by DeJong’s lawyers.
Training of this sort is an unusual and creative remedy. Litigants who have their free speech rights infringed should regularly demand it.
DeJong was one victim of an increasing wave of censorship by self-appointed gatekeepers of polite discourse. Under the banner of civility, these censors suppress ideas and facts that undermine their view of the way things should be.
The University of Texas at Austin, for instance, threatened to fire or penalize a professor who exposed the university’s plan to ensure that new hires have uniformly left-wing views on cultural issues.
Virginia Tech and other universities deploy bias response teams to silence disfavored views on campus. These teams rely on students to snitch on classmates who express “offensive” views and then subject those classmates to investigations, reeducation, or even discipline.
But if this seems like a problem only with higher ed, think again. Left-wing government officials are zealous censors, too.
Consider Barbara Ferrer, Los Angeles County director of public health. When her constituents took to Twitter to criticize her draconian COVID-19 orders, Ferrer leveraged a relationship with Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.—who then chaired a House committee responsible for oversight of companies like Twitter—to pressure Twitter to suppress that “misinformation.”
And, more generally, the Biden administration and its social media allies have created what one constitutional scholar calls “a vast system of censorship” that suppresses debate over “questions of great public importance.”
