Journalism prof placed on leave after anti-NRA tweet

[Igel]

17. That's confusing freedom of speech with nihilism.

Nobody's going to arrest the guy. Thus the constitution is upheld. The 1st amendment is completely irrelevant because it regulates the government's response to speech.

Now, if you want to say that the Constitution requires that everybody be quiet and make no demands of others regardless of what they say, then DU would have much reduced traffic because most of DU is complaining and calling for action based on others' speech.

If a politician uses an ethnic slur, hey--it's guaranteed speech, nobody can call for any penalty. Right?

Offensive speech is protected from government action. However, it's not protected from societal action. Don't like offensive speech and make a stink, suddenly it makes your organization or business less attractive. So you do something about it--possibly short term, possibly long term. We'll just have to stay the course to find out who the winner is, won' we? Perhaps the university will rescind his suspension, perhaps they'll find some way to make his life unpleasant so he'll migrate elsewhere.

This is something that school teachers know full well. One teacher was fired for using the word "negro." Granted it was a Spanish class, and granted she was teaching colors--and insisted on brown-skinned people being called "moreno". Still, the very use of a word that caused offense to the uneducated and ignorant was sufficient grounds for her dismissal. But the publicity made the school look bad and to defend the student would have pitted administrators against angry parents.

In this case, though, it's somebody who expressed the wish that innocent kids be killed for their parents' views of the 2nd amendment over an incident that didn't directly involve him.