flipping rationality

I've been grumpy for a while about this whole "academic freedom" thing. For those of you not in the academy, there's a push, led by the Usual Suspects, to increase "diversity" in the academy. By "diversity" they mean, not subjugated minorities, but those poor, beleaguered straight white males. They're just so misunderstood! When they call someone a "fag" in a classroom, it's not because they hate the sinner! They're just expressing their commitment to free speech and encouraging "diverse perspectives" in the classroom! (This and other nonsense can be seen on the Students for Academic Freedom website, which categorizes such complaints as "I took a women's studies course and it was totally biased towards feminism." (that's a quote.) So it has gotten me to think about the ways in which our hard won victories are being used against us. This isn't a happy line of thought, so I wouldn't recommend it. Today, however, a little victory, a little table-turning.

The Administration had sought to deny federal funds to universitites that barred military recruiters from campus (in this case, law schools who found that the military's anti-gay policy was discriminatory). A U.S. Court of Appeals (PA--5th Circuit, I think) ruled against the government, using the Boy Scouts case as precedent. Yes, that was the case that gave the Boy Scouts the right to discriminate against gay scout leaders. So, in a neat twist, the judge (Judge Ambro) wrote: "Just as the Boy Scouts believed that homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the Scout oath, the law schools believe that employment discrimination is inconsistent with their commitment to fairness and justice."

UPDATE: on Daily Kos, a great, and extremely disturbing, read on this:
"[T]his is a massive and dangerous expansion of the principles underlying the Boy Scouts decision. In that earlier decision, it was held that the government could not force a completely private organization to accept as a leader a person who's public views were at odds with the organizational principles. It's not even clear that the Boy Scouts under that decision are allowed to exclude gays who keep their views quiet, so it could be a limited precedent. However, this Third Circuit decision is far more expansive. Not only can a university refuse to hire peoples whose views they disagree with, they can exclude them altogether from their physical property. And the government is REQUIRED to fund such exclusionary organizations.
By the logic of the case, if the Klu Klux Klan sets up a university to teach hate speech, they would be within their organizational free speech rights to exclude blacks and the government would be required to fully fund that university in the same way as all other colleges."

Shit.