Administrators at California State University – San Marcos (CSUSM) denied a request from a pro-life student organization whose leaders sought funding to help pay for a conservative professor to come speak about abortion.
When the speaker in question, Mike Adams, a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina – Wilmington, heard about the kerfuffle, he pointed the Students for Life chapter to the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a nonprofit law firm specializing in religious liberty cases.
Soon thereafter, a lawsuit was filed on the pro-life students’ behalf. ADF attorney Sarah Kramer argued CSUSM’s decision to deny funding to the group constituted a “double standard” based on “viewpoint discrimination” regarding the young adults’ perspective on abortion.
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Each student at CSUSM is required to pay a student activity fee at the start of each semester. Those funds are then allocated to campus student organizations, whose members use the money to pay for events and other group functions.
According to Kramer, Students for Life cannot receive more than $500 in funding per semester and is barred from using the money to supplement the cost of bringing speakers in for events. But Nathan Apodaca, the president of the pro-life group, said that’s not the case for other student-led organizations.
From the ADF:
For example, the Gender Equity Center and the LGBTQA Pride Center receive more than $296,000 in student activity funding combined and regularly use those funds to bring in outside speakers and host events such as “Kink 101” — a workshop and discussion of bondage, dominance, sadism, and masochism.
Not only that, but it turns out the Gender Equity Center and the Pride Center receive over 22 percent of the student activity fee funding. With over 100 student groups on campus, that translates to roughly 2 percent of the student organizations on campus receiving over 22 percent of the student activity fee funding. That just didn’t add up.
For his part, Adams, in an interview with The Daily Wire, rebuked the California university for propping up a system that “does not promote free speech,” but is instead using student money to fund a “jobs creation program for otherwise unemployable government bureaucrats.”
The conservative professor went on to argue CSUSM is not working to preserve free speech but is rather determined to “preserve government jobs for ideological bigots.”
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“Most of the administrators in the CSU system call themselves ‘pro-choice,’” Adams explained, “but that means something different to them. It means that they pick and choose the winners and losers in the marketplace of ideas.”
He continued, “For administrators at CSUSM, debate is passé. They have declared themselves to be the winners in the culture wars. Their goal is no longer to debate ideas. Their goal is the implementation of ideas — their ideas.”
Adams, after learning the percentage of money given to sex-related events on CSUSM’s campus jokingly suggested the university should consider changing its name to “CSU – S&M,” a reference to sadomasochism.
Though he’s convinced the college cannot win the legal case, Adams predicted CSUSM will continue to fight the issue because they are using public money to make their case, which he said would “deprive taxpayers of their basic constitutional liberties.”