While reading about the ASUO resolution to ban the Pacifica Forum from campus, I was struck by a central element, one which seems to have been utterly ignored in your coverage. This whole fight has been a clash between imaginary “rights.” Those who favor ejecting the Pacifica Forum demand an imaginary right to not feel unsafe. Really? A “right” to have a feeling? I would welcome a link to the document that spells out the details and implications of that imagined right.
The defenders of the Pacifica Forum, on the other hand, are laboring under a more insidious imaginary right. That the individuals who are impotent and dull-witted enough to belong to this group have a right to free speech is clear. That right is spelled out in the U.S. Constitution. However, the notion that this real right has as its correlatives the “right” to use your fees and my tax dollars, to reserve and use real estate of which we are co-conservators and to borrow the light of the University’s reputation to promulgate and dignify their middle-brow muddle of hate and pseudo-history is nonsensical.
I have reasonably good bona fides when it comes to free speech. I was the founder, and for five years the director, of the first non-profit group to advocate for the free speech rights of bloggers worldwide, the Committee to Protect Bloggers. Our central premise was simple and strong: Everyone, everywhere has the right to express their ideas and beliefs without being punished by their government. This right was asserted in Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Because this right is clearly spelled out,  internally coherent, was passed unanimously and has become a global standard, we were the beneficiaries of a broad spectrum of support, from Iraqi Islamists to American military officers, from Egyptian heretics to conservative Christians. The Pacifica Forum has not been arrested by the government or its agents.
Unlike a 19-year-old Iranian student who wrote us, and for whom we found an attorney at Shirin Ebadi’s Nobel-prize-winning law firm, they have not been given 120 lashes. They have not been put upon or had their computers stolen by militia members backed by the government.
They are free to gibber witlessly on a blog, rant frothily on the sidewalk in front of Taylor’s, parade in Nazi drag up and down Willamette. But they have no right to demand the support of students, faculty and staff, no right to demand they be provided with rooms to meet in, no right to the legitimacy that comes from a presence in the mainstream of intellectual debate.
In other words, each of you at the University individually, have not the right, but the power, to eject these babblers if you choose, to withdraw your realty and cash from their dirty fingers and make them sell their cant in the marketplace of ideas.
To the editors and reporters of the Emerald, I say: Stop buying the terms the parties in this case are using without examining their validity.
To the student body and employees of the University, I say: Stop confusing this fight for a conflict between “rights.”
The Pacifica Forum’s opponents, if they wish to “feel safe,” should make themselves safe. It is nothing that can be demanded of others.
The Pacifica Forum, on the other hand, already has the right to free speech. What you, the students, faculty and staff of the University, have is a duty to either stamp their vileness with the imprimatur of the University or to deny it to them. In other words, it’s time to vote, not for a “resolution” but for the rightness or wrongness of the Pacifica Forum as an instrument of legitimate argumentation. If you believe theirs is a legitimate organization, with a legitimate point of view, allow them to speak on your campus.
If you believe them to be intellectual frauds, show them the door.
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