Post by RPankn on Jul 25, 2005 14:02:16 GMT -5
Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo happened because 31 law schools won't permit recruiters on campus!
Equal Access Denied
By Steven J. Nider
Most Americans feel an abiding sense of gratitude toward the men and women who are fighting so ably and bravely today in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet the U.S. military is persona non grata on many of America's elite college campuses. This isn't just a paradox, it's a scandal -- and progressive patriots [I think he meant nationalists] should demand an end to it.
Even as anti-Vietnam War protests fade mercifully into history [You d**n hippies! Peace is an embarassment! We must have totalwar!], top-tier schools like Harvard and Yale still deny military recruiters access to their students. These and other Ivy League colleges also refuse to allow Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) cadets to train on their campuses -- even though they have no problem accepting ROTC scholarship money or lucrative research contracts from the Defense Department [What a pathetic argument.].
To this familiar story, many of the nation's law schools are adding a discreditable new twist. Calling themselves the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR), a coalition of 31 law schools have sued to block enforcement of the Solomon Amendment, a federal law requiring universities to give military recruiters equal access to their students or risk losing millions of dollars in federal funding. Their reason? To protest the Pentagon's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy toward gays in the military. [God forbid anyone other than the corporations have a voice, and access to the legal system, in the DLC's eyes.]
Last year, the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted FAIR an injunction against enforcement of the Solomon Amendment, saying the law "requires law schools to express a message that is incompatible with their educational objectives, and no compelling governmental interest has been shown to deny this freedom." The Supreme Court will take up the case this fall.
The litigious approach taken by FAIR to oppose the law may not be surprising -- the group is a coalition of law schools, after all. But any first-year law student should be able to tell you that the more appropriate thing to do when you don't like a law is to wade into the political process and try to change it [Yo, bozo. Have you been to law school? I have and that's not what's taught first year, which is mostly spent training students to think like lawyers. That means interpreting and understanding the law as written and applying to it a given set of facts; not "wading into the political process" to change something you don't like.]. It makes little sense to sue an executive-branch agency for implementing the will of Congress -- unless your real goal is to strike an anti-military posture [Um, no. It's called a suit for a declaratory judgment, which means asking a court to determine whether a law is constitutional before a cause of action has accrued under it, which may be too late in certain cases. If the plaintiff's situation meets certain criteria, it's a right available to them under our legal system.] FAIR argues that in discriminating [Now there's a loaded word used improperly.] against military recruiters, law schools are taking a stand for their right of free expression -- that is, their right to have a policy that excludes a group based on its policies. But in fact, the law schools are abridging the speech of another group whose viewpoint differs from their own: the military. [Sorry bozo, but under the assembly clause of the First Amendment, Harvard and Yale also have the "negative" right to not associate. Further, as private instutitions, they can exclude those they don't want as long as it does not violate local, state or Federal civil rights laws, and the military is not a protected class.]
Leading Democrats ought to denounce the practice of barring military recruiters -- for whatever reason -- from many of our best colleges. These bans censor student choice, making it more difficult for interested students to explore military careers [It's hard for them to find a a local recruiting office and go to it?! If a law student has trouble with that concept, one should wonder whether they should be in law school in the first place. ]. They implicitly tell our best and brightest that there's something wrong -- and maybe shameful -- about military service.
A sad irony is that now is exactly the wrong time to ban military recruiters from, of all places, law schools. The prisoner abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay happened to a significant degree because the military either lacked clear rules and guidelines for treating detainees or adopted badly flawed ones [No, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo happened because the administration has a few policy makers of questionable loyalties adopting tactics from their mother country in their war for 'Greater Israel' and against Arabs and Islam itself. Further, the government has an army of lawyers that should be quite capable of imparting the Geneva Conventions to the military, if not common human decency should tell someone it's not ok to rape 8 year olds. Just because a few dozen law schools have blocked recruiters from campus does not excuse those who formulated the torture policy.] The military needs sharp legal minds to administer the military justice system, defend enemy combatants, provide high-quality legal services to military personnel, and advise commanders about international conventions and treaties [Huh? Like the military doesn't already have its own justice system right now? What in the hell does he think JAG, the NMCC, etc., do?!].
The only defensible argument against the Solomon Amendment is that recent revisions have made it too broad. For example, a violation of the law cuts off federal funds to an entire university, which means a law school that excludes recruiters can hurt other university departments.
But Democrats, while being open to refinements, should defend the Solomon Amendment's core purpose. Barring recruiters from campus won't change the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, but it will cripple the military's ability to bolster its ranks with some of the nation's brightest young minds [Because recruiting's been wildly successful among the general population lately, right?]. In a time of war, with recruitment levels falling, that's a crying shame. [So when is this bozo going to enlist? Someone should send him a recruiting application.]
Steven J. Nider is director of foreign and security studies at the Progressive Policy Institute. [If this is the best the Democrats have on foreign policy, the party is in a hell of a lot of trouble.]
www.dlc.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=124&subid=307&contentid=253460
Equal Access Denied
By Steven J. Nider
Most Americans feel an abiding sense of gratitude toward the men and women who are fighting so ably and bravely today in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet the U.S. military is persona non grata on many of America's elite college campuses. This isn't just a paradox, it's a scandal -- and progressive patriots [I think he meant nationalists] should demand an end to it.
Even as anti-Vietnam War protests fade mercifully into history [You d**n hippies! Peace is an embarassment! We must have totalwar!], top-tier schools like Harvard and Yale still deny military recruiters access to their students. These and other Ivy League colleges also refuse to allow Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) cadets to train on their campuses -- even though they have no problem accepting ROTC scholarship money or lucrative research contracts from the Defense Department [What a pathetic argument.].
To this familiar story, many of the nation's law schools are adding a discreditable new twist. Calling themselves the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR), a coalition of 31 law schools have sued to block enforcement of the Solomon Amendment, a federal law requiring universities to give military recruiters equal access to their students or risk losing millions of dollars in federal funding. Their reason? To protest the Pentagon's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy toward gays in the military. [God forbid anyone other than the corporations have a voice, and access to the legal system, in the DLC's eyes.]
Last year, the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted FAIR an injunction against enforcement of the Solomon Amendment, saying the law "requires law schools to express a message that is incompatible with their educational objectives, and no compelling governmental interest has been shown to deny this freedom." The Supreme Court will take up the case this fall.
The litigious approach taken by FAIR to oppose the law may not be surprising -- the group is a coalition of law schools, after all. But any first-year law student should be able to tell you that the more appropriate thing to do when you don't like a law is to wade into the political process and try to change it [Yo, bozo. Have you been to law school? I have and that's not what's taught first year, which is mostly spent training students to think like lawyers. That means interpreting and understanding the law as written and applying to it a given set of facts; not "wading into the political process" to change something you don't like.]. It makes little sense to sue an executive-branch agency for implementing the will of Congress -- unless your real goal is to strike an anti-military posture [Um, no. It's called a suit for a declaratory judgment, which means asking a court to determine whether a law is constitutional before a cause of action has accrued under it, which may be too late in certain cases. If the plaintiff's situation meets certain criteria, it's a right available to them under our legal system.] FAIR argues that in discriminating [Now there's a loaded word used improperly.] against military recruiters, law schools are taking a stand for their right of free expression -- that is, their right to have a policy that excludes a group based on its policies. But in fact, the law schools are abridging the speech of another group whose viewpoint differs from their own: the military. [Sorry bozo, but under the assembly clause of the First Amendment, Harvard and Yale also have the "negative" right to not associate. Further, as private instutitions, they can exclude those they don't want as long as it does not violate local, state or Federal civil rights laws, and the military is not a protected class.]
Leading Democrats ought to denounce the practice of barring military recruiters -- for whatever reason -- from many of our best colleges. These bans censor student choice, making it more difficult for interested students to explore military careers [It's hard for them to find a a local recruiting office and go to it?! If a law student has trouble with that concept, one should wonder whether they should be in law school in the first place. ]. They implicitly tell our best and brightest that there's something wrong -- and maybe shameful -- about military service.
A sad irony is that now is exactly the wrong time to ban military recruiters from, of all places, law schools. The prisoner abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay happened to a significant degree because the military either lacked clear rules and guidelines for treating detainees or adopted badly flawed ones [No, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo happened because the administration has a few policy makers of questionable loyalties adopting tactics from their mother country in their war for 'Greater Israel' and against Arabs and Islam itself. Further, the government has an army of lawyers that should be quite capable of imparting the Geneva Conventions to the military, if not common human decency should tell someone it's not ok to rape 8 year olds. Just because a few dozen law schools have blocked recruiters from campus does not excuse those who formulated the torture policy.] The military needs sharp legal minds to administer the military justice system, defend enemy combatants, provide high-quality legal services to military personnel, and advise commanders about international conventions and treaties [Huh? Like the military doesn't already have its own justice system right now? What in the hell does he think JAG, the NMCC, etc., do?!].
The only defensible argument against the Solomon Amendment is that recent revisions have made it too broad. For example, a violation of the law cuts off federal funds to an entire university, which means a law school that excludes recruiters can hurt other university departments.
But Democrats, while being open to refinements, should defend the Solomon Amendment's core purpose. Barring recruiters from campus won't change the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, but it will cripple the military's ability to bolster its ranks with some of the nation's brightest young minds [Because recruiting's been wildly successful among the general population lately, right?]. In a time of war, with recruitment levels falling, that's a crying shame. [So when is this bozo going to enlist? Someone should send him a recruiting application.]
Steven J. Nider is director of foreign and security studies at the Progressive Policy Institute. [If this is the best the Democrats have on foreign policy, the party is in a hell of a lot of trouble.]
www.dlc.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=124&subid=307&contentid=253460
