Sooner or later the juvenile puns at Mark Foley’s expense are going to get old, but who am I to call time on such a fun game? I can’t help that this story’s got legs. Such strong, hot, lacrosse-hardened legs.

At Georgia Tech today, some administrators gave a presentation and panel discussion about the new/old/whatever speech policy on campus, inasmuch as the old-new rules, which apparently banned “intolerant” speech, were thrown out in court and we’ve gone back to some new-old rules, or something. The court decision came after a lawsuit was filed by a legal defense group that “protects” conservative Christian students from persecution on dirty liberal campuses, because this rampant persecution of the ruling majority has gone on long enough. College Republicans like Ruth Malhotra were incensed that the old-new speech policy would prevent her from talking crap about the evil gay-homosexuals who represent all that is wrong with our country, so they successfully sued for their First Amendment right to hate speech.

And you know what? Good on ‘er, mate. It doesn’t take a long-term reader of thissy here blog to guess that as much as a “girl” like Malhotra makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit every time I see her, I wholeheartedly support her right to be as much of a bitch in public as I am on the internets. And in public. And at home, in the office, at the Vortex, and while sleeping. As uncomfortable as it may be for traditionally dicked-over persons like gays and blacks and whomever else Malhotra hates in that cold, black lump of coal she has under her severely underwhelming chest, I hold the freedom of speech in the highest regard and will go down fighting for it no matter what kind of crap you want to say. Otherwise, it’s a slippery slope down to the days when I myself can’t criticize this administration for making the world less safe for Americans nor poke fun at that frumpy chick with the bad skin and bitchy agenda. I don’t know if the university is going to set up some kind of ombudsman to handle cases where protected hate speech crosses over into all-out harassment or what; personally, I think we should just establish an Office of Crap Reflection, in which ideologically-segregated comedians and writers help the offended student(s) craft an equally obnoxious retort to the haters. Perhaps I’m being too hopeful.

So today, after this morning’s new-old-revised speech policy presentation, some gay-friendly group on campus set up a booth on the walkway where student groups do such things, and they offered pens and post-it notes for students to come up and share their thoughts on bulletin boards with different socio-political questions about the civil rights of gay people. Across the walkway, the College Republicans set up a table to mock the gay students, displaying a big sign that said “Traditional Marriage - Vote GOP” and handing out little discrimination leaflets. The only other table out on the walkway today, a little ways down, was some eastern philosophy book club with a very calm dude trying to Ommmmm his way into ignoring the cross-walkway vortex of animosity that was totally disrupting his Chi.

Now perhaps I’m just being a little sensitive — we liberals are well-known to be complete pussies — but seeing the in-your-face counterdisplay on the part of the College Republicans really drove home the fact that it’s not just that I disagree with a number of the tenets of the GOP, it’s that I really don’t like the way they’ve made being dickheads about it a fun and acceptable part of public discourse. Politics is such an ugly thing these days, and perhaps I’m being naive here but I’m going to go ahead and point a finger and say, “You started it.” I spent a lot of my early teen years listening, while on long summer drives to North Carolina with my parents, to Rush Limbaugh, about the only thing besides country music we could pick up consistently. I found it more amusing than blood-boiling at the time, because anything ranty appealed to my sick sense of humor and I was too young to really grasp (or care about) what I was hearing. But from Limbaugh to Hannity to O’Reilly to Savage, AM radio is just a historical record of how the Right took debate down the toilet. The Left had to go out and invent its own AM station just to keep up! I was hearing about “snot-nosed, bed-wetting liberals” on the air for years before anyone on the other side reached my radio with rants about “the Bush crime family.”

But I digress.

So Malhotra and her gang were out with their Righteous Christian Elephant sign across from the dirty queermos, and as I tried to slink back to my office with my fancy liberal coffee, one of them stuck a leaflet in my face and said with an inquisitive uptone, “Defend traditional marriage?”

I said, “What, you mean like with pages?” As if this idiot didn’t see this coming — how could he not? North Korea didn’t wipe our collective consciousness that fast — his jaw dropped a little and he just stared blankly at me. Shame on him, not having a comeback ready when trying to trot out the facade of morality only a week after we met Gram the One-Eyed Snake. If you’re gonna fight, fight smart, ’cause boy, I got 12 good years of being a dickhead on you, and a better education to boot.



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