On Monday, Republican leaders of the Georgia Senate announced that they would kill a $40 million tax cut they were about to grant Delta Air Lines. Their reason? Responding to public protests, Delta had decided to end discounts it had offered to members of the National Rifle Association, and for that egregious act, Georgia conservatives decided that the company had to be punished.
Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle, the presiding officer of the Senate and a Republican candidate for governor, put it this way:
Yet that very day, just a few hours later, those very same Georgia Republicans passed a bill that sanctimoniously lectures state colleges and universities about the importance of protecting free expression, and to demand punishment of students who try to block the expression of opinions that they don’t like.
In Senate Bill 339, those Georgia Republicans haughtily instruct college officials and the Board of Regents that "it is not the proper role of the institution to shield individuals from speech protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, including, without limitation, ideas and opinions which they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive."
Under the bill, the Senate warns that “no institution may deny a student organization any benefit or privilege available to other campus student organizations ... based on the content of that organization's expression.”
It also demands that “a range of disciplinary sanctions shall be established for anyone under the jurisdiction of the institution who materially and substantially interferes with the free expression of others.”
Do you believe these people? I’m having a hard time.
They are demanding that 19- or 20-year-old college students be suspended, expelled or otherwise punished for doing precisely the same thing that they themselves, as adults, are bragging about doing to Delta. They believe it is reprehensible for individuals and student groups to try to shut down speakers or message that they don’t want to hear -- and I would agree with that assessment -- yet somehow they do not grasp that it is infinitely more dangerous, and infinitely more unAmerican, to enlist the awesome powers of government in such an effort at suppression.
We live in a strange country these days. The once-useful notion of shame has been escorted to the border by armed guards and warned never to return, and hypocrisy abounds in every corner of the land. But I am hard-pressed to cite an example of that hypocrisy more egregious than that perpetrated Tuesday right here in Atlanta, Georgia.
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