When video footage of some apparently imbibing frat boys (and a few sorority girls) from the University of Oklahoma participating in a racist chant recently went viral, the reaction was fast and furious.  There was public outrage, the fraternity’s chapter was quickly dissolved, and two of the students who led the chant were expelled from the university.  

I have no problem with the fraternity chapter being shut down, and the university has the right to discipline its students according to its own code of conduct.  But did the offending students deserve to be expelled, especially considering the vast amount of garbage that goes on at so many institutions of higher learning on a daily basis?

Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, issued this statement on March 12:

Racist speech on campus is unacceptable and should be addressed by administrators. But does it warrant expulsion? If it constitutes a ‘clear and present danger,’ it should. For example, consider a racist speaker who gins up a crowd of supporters on campus, and then spots a few persons of the opposite race. Next he urges the crowd to attack them, and they do. That is not protected speech: it is an incitement to riot.

This analogy is not even close to what happened in Oklahoma. To be sure, two freshmen were on a bus acting irresponsibly, but no one was even remotely threatened by their speech. To expel them for speech that is merely objectionable, but not threatening, is more than problematic—it calls into question the rank duplicity of college administrators that is commonplace on campuses across the nation.

Anti-Catholicism is tolerated on campuses in a way that is not true of other expressions of bigotry. If anyone has any doubts about this, let him go to the websites of civil rights groups that represent gays, blacks, Jews, and Muslims, and then compare the findings to those found on the website of the Catholic League (check the Education section in our Annual Reports)…. Catholics have had to endure more bigotry on campus than any other group.

In 1998, the anti-Catholic play ‘Corpus Christi’ was performed in New York. I led a demonstration protesting it. Three years later when it was staged at a mid-western university, I again protested, but I also refused to join a lawsuit against the university. In short, any discussion of bigoted speech on campus should begin by asking why anti-Catholicism is tolerated, but objectionable speech aimed at others is not.

Racism is indefensible, for sure.  Yet the left is no doubt salivating at the prospect of treating all conservative Christians – no matter how nice our language is in any given situation – in the same manner as these now former fraternity members.