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SFSU in ‘National Review Online’
National Review Online features an article today by Brendan Conway about the College Republicans at San Francisco State University (SFSU). Conway writes:
What is quite possibly the strangest flag-desecration controversy in American history is afoot right now at San Francisco State University. It’s strange for several reasons, firstly because the right to torch, stomp, or otherwise annihilate a flag was asserted nearly 18 years ago by the Supreme Court in Johnson v. Texas, and should be pretty much settled by now.
Not here, though, where a chapter of College Republicans could be disbanded for allegedly inciting hostility via an act of flag desecration. Their hearing is this Friday.
The whole event is stranger still because the flags in question are not American flags, but copies of those of the terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas—which helps explain why the university’s administrators are treating the case differently.
Conway points out that FIRE “has been all over this case.” That we have. And we’re fixing to get even more all over it because SFSU has scheduled a hearing for tomorrow, at which a panel of faculty, staff, and students—some of whom are responsible for passing a resolution condemning the College Republicans’ flag-stomping—will determine whether the group is guilty of incitement, creating a hostile environment, and actions of incivility.
Conway closes with a wise recommendation: “San Francisco State should just drop the case. The offense was unintentional and the underlying act is constitutionally protected. The whiff of the whole thing is just wrong.”
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