Editor’s note: This is in response to the article “ASUNM votes to evict mor chikin,” published in Friday’s Daily Lobo. The article was about ASUNM’s vote to recommend kicking Chick-fil-A out of the SUB. ASUNM conducted a student survey about the restaurant, and 85 percent of students surveyed wanted Chick-fil-A to stay. This week, the SUB Board will vote on the restaurant’s future in the SUB.
Editor,
I applaud the ASUNM Senate vote regarding Chick-fil-A, and further hereby petition the University of New Mexico to remove all belief systems, opinions and speech originating from incorrect thought.
As a garden of free speech and inquiry, the University must diligently prune and weed out deviant and dangerous ideas.
Individuals and organizations of diverse views must be coerced to align themselves within accepted norms. No criticism, offensive speech or behavior should be tolerated, as determined by established boundaries of the fashionably politically correct.
Labels of convenience such as “bigot” or “hate-filled” shall be applied whenever suitable to discredit nonconformists. Additional measures should be employed, including outright banning from the public sphere all organizations, e.g., Chick-fil-A, and individuals who, for instance, deviate on fundamental human rights issues regarding freedom of religion, speech or sexuality.
As guardians of truth, the ASUNM Senate and the University must maintain due diligence; people and organizations who hold wrong and hurtful opinions deserve punishment and should be silenced for the good of society.
The prescient words of Jonathan Rauch summarize this issue so well. “In English we have a word for the empanelment of tribunals … to identify and penalize false and socially dangerous opinions.
The word applies reasonably well to a system in which a university student is informed against, and then summoned to a hearing and punished, for making incorrect and hurtful remarks during a conversation late at night. The word has been out of general circulation for many years. It is ‘inquisition,’” (1993).
Shawn Means
UNM alumnus
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