To its credit, Michigan State University has not yet succumbed to this blatantly out-of-bounds request to censor other students by members of a latino/a student group, according to the Lansing State Journal.

About 30 representatives from Chicanos y Latino Unidos (CLU), along with members of several other organizations, met for about a half hour earlier this week on the steps of MSU's Hannah Administration Center to "challenge the university into having them take a stand about ... what the difference is between freedom of speech and hate speech, fighting words and violent speech," CLU President Gabriela Alcazar said.

Specifically, CLU wants MSU officials to disallow another student organization - Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) - from hosting speakers who "speak against minorities" and "instigate and threaten people and insult people," said Alcazar, 20, who originally is from Imlay City.

"There's a point where they don't have the right to say the things they've been saying," said the international relations and social relations and policy major. CLU wants the university "to begin drawing a line and not keep covering everything with freedom of speech."

That's a clear of a request to violate the First Amendment as I've ever seen. It would take pages to fully cover the missteps in logic contained in these three paragraphs.

The group CLU is attacking is Kyle Bristow's YAF organization, which, as we reported this spring was put on the Southern Poverty Law Center's (SPLC) "hate group" list without a serious investigation by Heidi Beirich, their "intelligence" director. Beirich interviewed with Power, Politics, & Money, and when she didn't like the fact that we didn't throw her softball questions, she terminated the interview abruptly and issued strange accusations that we were harassing her. While we're no fan of Bristow's overly-confrontational tactics which appear to lack patience, that is sometimes the sophomoric nature of college student speech - speech which must still be protected Constitutionally.

The Kansas City Star reports on the Missouri Secretary of State's actions to use her raw power to thwart the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative. What stands out on a second glance is how the Secretary of State chose to use "preference" when it suited her and "affirmative action" when it suited her. This inconsistency between paragraphs itself should be a legal downfall (although Courts are political too, and as the Star reports none of the SoS language in previous initiatives has been overturned by the courts, although its unknown how egregious her language writing was).

Carnahan’s office used this language:

“Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended to:

“Ban affirmative action programs designed to eliminate discrimination against, and improve opportunities for, women and minorities in public contracting, employment and education; and

“Allow preferential treatment based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin to meet federal program funds eligibility standards as well as preferential treatment for bona fide qualifications based on sex?”

What's amazing is that Carnahan has found a way to say MoCRI "bans affirmative action" (the "good type" in her opinion as the "designed to" implicates), AND say that MoCRI actually "allows preferential treatment" in her twisted misusing of the federal funding safe haven. She's actually pervertedly used the federal funding clause - one that theoretically protects some affirmative action - to say MoCRI "allows preferential treatment". So there is the foolish inconsistency she should have to explain to a court. If "affirmative action" is supposed to be the operative language that MCRI and MoCRI and other drives allegedly "concealed" from the public, at the least then one would expect that second paragraph to say "allow affirmative action ... to meet federal", rather than "allow preferential treatment." It is this complete inconsistency that makes Carnahan's language so offensively biased and abusive.

Here's MoCRI's submission. Note, the second paragraph is exactly the operative language of the law as it would appear in the Constitution. It would be understandable if the first sentence were somewhat different than proposed(though not inaccurate of Asher in his suggestion), but Asher's proposal opts for precision by copying the language of the proposal rather than interpretation.

Asher’s group had suggested the following language:

“Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended to prohibit any form of discrimination as an act of the state by declaring:

“The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education or public contracting?”

The unfortunate thing for MoCRI is legal challenges are draining, and courts can be political. Missouri will be an uphill fight.