In the padded cells that are our current universities, there’s no room for clubs who are anti-abortion or who refuse to acknowledge “the patriarchy.”
There’s no room for debate. No place for divergent views contrary to their own orthodoxies.
The student unions at Ryerson, UofT Mississauga, the University of Ontario Institute of Technology and Durham College refused to authorize three clubs who run afoul of current delicate political correctness: two are pro-life and a third is a men’s rights group. Now these banned heretics have gone to court, backed by the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, to fight the “bad faith and bias” that has denied them official status on campus.
Justice Centre lawyer Marty Moore was in Superior Court Wednesday to argue the student associations keep changing the rules of entry to block these groups over their currently unpopular views. He urged Justice Paul Perell to order the associations to accredit the three clubs as a matter of “natural justice.”
“Student unions’ actions against students with differing ideological perspectives is stifling democratic discussion and debate on campus, where diversity of opinion is supposed to flourish,” he argued in a factum filed earlier with the court.
Without official sanction, clubs can’t get student union funding and can’t advertise, book rooms and information tables, or host speakers and debates on campus, he said. They’re essentially pariahs without a voice.
Ryerson’s Men’s Issues Awareness Society (MIAS) was created in 2015 to deal with issues that disproportionately affect men and boys, “such as higher rates of suicide, homelessness, workplace injuries and failure in school.” Nearly half of MIAS’ members are women.
But the club has repeatedly been denied recognition by the Ryerson Students’ Union. The RSU claimed the group could cause an “unsafe” environment for women on campus and has purported links to anti-feminist groups, which it denies. The biggest strike against them, it seems, is that they haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid: they were told it was an RSU requirement to acknowledge the “systemic privilege that men have.”
“They have to acknowledge there’s a systemic suppression of women?” the judge asked incredulously.
He was told that they must.
“Isn’t there something wrong in making someone take an oath on what they believe or don’t believe?” Perrel asked. “Isn’t there something offensive requiring someone to acknowledge someone else’s belief systems?”
There certainly is.
On Oct. 27, 2015, MIAS was informed its application for club status had been rejected.
“The reasons they gave us were ridiculous,” the group’s former president Kevin Arriola recalled in an interview. “They claimed that we would bring violence and misogyny against women on campus, which is not true. Half our members were women. If you look at our mandate, our constitution, as well as the events that we held, none of them were in any way directed negatively towards women. ”
UTM Students for Life used to have club status at UofT Mississauga but the students’ union refused to renew them because of their “stance on abortion.” Then they changed tack and said it was because of technical problems in their constitution. Yet when SFL tried to make the required changes, Moore claimed the student association stacked the meeting with people opposed to the group and the motion failed.
These “shenanigans,” he said, are examples of the bad faith these clubs have endured. Perell conceded it seemed rather “kafkaesque.”
The third group, Speak for the Weak, was told it was denied club status because it’s pro-life and allowing the club on campus would run counter to “building an environment free of systemic societal oppression and decolonization.”
For heaven’s sake.
Meanwhile, the lawyers for the student unions insisted they are private corporations making private decisions and the court has no right to interfere. The Charter, they argued, doesn’t apply to them.
But they operate in public institutions funded by tax dollars – why do they get to silence voices that have a right to be heard?
The judge has reserved his decision.
http://torontosun.com/news/local-news/mandel-banned-from-campus-groups-fight-back
