What Happens When Political Correctness Runs Wild

One of my associates, Karen Lugo, is a constitutional law attorney who teaches at Chapman University in Orange, California. She also acted as emcee of the February 13 Yorba Linda protest against two radical Islamic speakers who spoke at a fund raiser by the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA). As has been previously reported, certain people who showed up for that rally, broke off from the event to heckle and chant at ICNA attendees as they arrived. The Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR) used the incident to produce a slanted  and edited video of the event to try and paint the protest organizers and speakers as Islamophobic bigots-even though they had nothing to do with the actions of the hotheads.  Then the politically-correct Orange County Human Relations Commisssion (OCHRC) got invloved and held a hastily-assembled kangaroo court that did CAIR's bidding. Based on the 5-minute, edited CAIR video of the protest and ignoring a one-hour video produced by the protest organizers, the OCHRC, under the leadership of their empty-suit director, Rusty Kennedy,  made their decision and issued a biased statement against the protest organizers.

Worse yet, Lugo has faced retaliation at Chapman University, where an associate professor and a higher-ranking university official rallied students to try and get Lugo fired for her role in the Yorba Linda protest-though she had said nothing objectionable. (I was there and heard everything she said.) This week, Lugo wrote her side of the story to the Orange County Register, a timid newspaper that hides under its collective desk in the face of Islamic radicalism in Orange County. As of this point, the Register has not published her letter. I will, however. Here it is.
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OC’s Government Speechminders


"Shouting the vilest of epithets to families of military sons and daughters as they bury their fallen children is legally tolerated in this country for the sake of protecting speech on matters of public concern, yet vitally important speech to identify and reject dangerous, jihadist imams visiting our communities is being censored. Why the difference between the expansive protection that the Supreme Court gives to First Amendment free speech rights and the restrictions placed on speech at the community level? It seems that, although our fallen military heroes have sacrificed their lives to protect American freedoms -- and to offer a form of these freedoms to Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan -- we are allowing the most essential of these rights to be compromised. The highest Court recognizes that free speech is the cornerstone on which all other liberty rests but that memo was not received in parts of Orange County.


The challenge in a free society is to encourage respectful and reasonable speech while not succumbing to the idea that undignified expression should be silenced. Shouting, insulting, and burning symbols has never been effective but moving to silence every voice for fear that some on the fringe will offend leads to cultural suicide. This is the danger when government commissions are established for the primary purpose of responding to complaint groups. The raison d’etre of bodies like the Orange County Human Relations Commission -- “governed by 11 Commissioners appointed by the Board of Supervisors and the League of Cities, and administered by the Orange County Housing Community Services Department” – quite simply is to seek hate and stop hate. The problem is, as proven by the OCHRC, that complaint groups will be only too happy to define hate for them and lure them into condemning any speech that might be considered offensive. Very dangerous stuff for a democracy.


When being called on the carpet by the OCHRC for inciting hate (although this is technically not accurate since the OCHRC does not inform one that she is subject of a hearing), it is obvious that some commissioners are well intentioned, but they all could not be more wrong about their perceived task to “seek out causes of discrimination and intolerance -- and eliminate those causes.” It is one thing to bring factions together for a pow-wow but a radically different thing to think that mere volunteer tolerance monitors can eliminate the causes of intolerance. Where do these delusions come from? Sadly, the OCHRC has assumed this mission and has gone rogue in interpreting the mission to mean actively judging and condemning speech. The most abhorrent revelation for those of us recently under their microscope was that they were prepared to accept complaints of hate speech at face value with abysmal effort to learn readily available facts.

If these claims sound alarmist, consider this recent episode. In February, about 500 very normal and respectful Southern Californians gathered in Yorba Linda to protest two extremist Islamist imams. A sideshow of hecklers also showed. Although the official speakers affirmed moderate Muslims 16 times during the hour-long program, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) released a doctored video showing only rants by the hecklers with images of our peaceful rally superimposed. Of course, there was no mention of the virulent extremist imams that were the reason for the main peaceful protest rally. This is not surprising considering that CAIR was the spin doctor. CAIR was created to be a public relations arm of Hamas in the United States; CAIR has recently been confirmed as an un-indicted co-conspirator in the nations’ largest terror funding conviction; and, the FBI has cut ties to the organization. It is therefore routine for this discredited organization to rely character assassination to advance its agenda. In light of all this, most commissioners still accepted CAIR’s obviously doctored video as representing all the facts of the case that they needed to know.


Now some say that the commission’s “findings” are no matter since it has no official power. First, tell this to CAIR who trotted out ostensible hate crimes (one was completely debunked and the other cannot be verified) and implied that these resulted from the hateful atmosphere created when the protest rally spotlighted two extreme Islamists. For every claimed hate crime, CAIR calls on the OCHRC to “investigate.” In a real stunner, Rusty Kennedy, Executive Director of the OCHRC accepted the unconfirmed hate crime claim as fact and then speculated for attribution in the Voice of OC that “he didn't know whether the hate crime and the protest were related, but ‘It did come right on the heels of that confrontation between those communities.’" Clearly CAIR is very familiar with being the tail that wags this dog.

Consider that CAIR’s agents of radicalization had mobilized to threaten those of us involved in the protest rally. In addition to physical threats, hundreds of students rallied with Associate Professor of Political Science Nubar Hovsepian at Chapman University where I teach a constitutional law clinic to demand my termination, although I performed my role as emcee at the rally with no mention of my professional affiliations. Thankfully, Chapman’s President Doti and Chancellor Struppa issued the following profoundly wise vindication of speech:

'We [also] believe that we cannot hold Lugo responsible for statements made by others at the rally. Responsibility is an individual matter. If this were not the case, very few would ever organize any event on any controversial issue for fear that some of the speakers or audience members might say something objectionable. But let us now move to the second question. What if we, in fact, discover that Lugo did make statements that we consider hateful? Would we then terminate her appointment at Chapman? We personally believe that free speech must be protected because it is the indispensable condition for a truly free country. Free speech is a critical ingredient in the search for truth. Recall that Galileo was forced to recant his view that the earth revolved around the sun because it was inconsistent with religious dogma that prevailed at the time and therefore was considered heretical.'



"Also, among the several vital constitutional protections that the OCHRC completely ignored are the right to confront one’s accuser and the procedural due process provision that government proceedings having a potential impact on a citizen’s life, liberty, or property will involve notice and a fair hearing. Contrary to these constitutional protections, the hearing to adjudicate whether our protest rally “created an envirornment of hate” was hastily scheduled and not one person involved with the rally was formally notified. It was only by fortunate coincidence some of us learned hours before the session began that it may be important to attend in interest of providing facts. As we used our allotted 3-minutes to do this, we learned that only two of the eleven commissioners present had taken time to view the hour-long video of the actual rally proceedings which was readily available on the internet. As our videotape of the hearing documents, nine of the commissioners had arrived at the meeting ready to “reach consensus” on the matter of whether the 500 participants and organizers of our rally had committed condemnable hate conduct without the facts.


To be sure, the commission claims that it is not tasked to condemn actions but the minutes for our session do reveal that staff was requested to compose the draft public comment “condemning the horrible statements . . . .” Tellingly, the word hate appears 5 times in the final statement. At no time does the commission take issue with the demonstrated efforts of CAIR to distort and malign the patriotic protest. Also, the statement did not ever identify the two radical imams and their customarily repugnant anti-Semitic hate speech easily found on many YouTube recordings. To wit, the press was evicted from the event that featured the radical imams so nobody knows what was actually said to the Muslim crowd that evening.


What is most tragic about this entire episode is that CAIR was allowed to push its message of division, intimidation, and fear unchallenged. This enables CAIR to continue driving a wedge between moderate Muslims and the constitutional culture that welcomes their participation. Many of us work with patriotic Muslims like Dr. Zuhdi Jasser to encourage all Muslims who uphold constitutional free speech, freedom of conscience, and religious freedom to join in public defense of these principles. This was our main message the afternoon of the rally and it is tragic that the OCHRC has abetted CAIR in distorting it."


Karen Lugo: Co-Director, Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence and Visiting Clinical Professor, Chapman University School of Law