One of these things is not like the other!
Want to smoke pot in public at the University of Colorado today? Move along, and never mind the fish fertilizer, especially if you don’t have a CU i.d. to prove that you’re a member of the campus community. But of course, if you’re armed to the teeth with handguns and shotguns of your choosing, campus denizens and members of the public alike are always welcome on our state university campuses! (And for now anyway, students at CU can even keep their guns in their dorm rooms. Awesome!!!)
Think about this for a moment: a district court judge has ruled that a public university may ban all non-students and non-employees from a public university campus today, just because the admin says so, whereas other courts have ruled that public universities have no right to forbid anyone–students, faculty, staff, and the general public–from campus with a gun, so long as it’s permitted.
What do you think the state legislators and pols who manufactured this paradox were smoking?
So long as we’re arbitrarily kicking people off of public university campuses, can I get the angry, disheveled, and usually anti-gay street preachers banned from Baa Ram U.? Their thinking is just as disordered as their appearance. (Some of them look like the former jocks that they are, clean-shaven and turning to stout, while a surprising number of them have crazy long beards and some of them bring their collection of young wives and fair-haired babies and toddlers along for the show. Seriously.) I fail to see how they add much to the exchange of ideas on campus. More importantly, I believe that these men (and of course, they’re always men) are creating a hostile learning and working environment for my LGBTQ students and colleagues.
Maybe I should just start a gun club for gay students. Lavender, locked, and loaded, babies!
Historiann 
A gun club for gay students? That’d make heads explode for certain knee-jerk supporters of the NRA mindset and the on-campus preacher set!
I remember some of those preachers on my undergraduate campus way back in the 1980s. Most would attract a healthy crowd of hecklers which gave me hope for the future of humanity. Since our campus lacks a convenient open-air forum for these types (and we’re located in the northern boonies where it’s snowing heavily today, eep!) we don’t get so many of them. We also don’t get the whole gun culture here, but that’s a national divide. I count my blessings, believe you me.
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Janice, all of the anti-gay preachers I’ve seen, and most of the others I’ve seen who aren’t necessarily anti-gay, have attracted crowds of students who argue against their ideas. It’s actually made me feel positive about the intellectual energy among our students. However, those are the ones who talk back; how many other gay, lesbian, bi, or questioning students walk by and feel unwelcome and unwanted on their own campus?
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Guns are people too; ask Scalia. While individuals slowly but surely are losing rights, companies and guns are capturing the loss for themselves. Closing the university to “undesirables” is part of the commercialization of our universities. After all, the CEO/president is an almost absolute monarch. Hence, “go away.”
It all makes a lot of sense to our elites.
LGBTQ don’t need our help, only our support. From Harvey Milk, through the Names Project, DADT and now the spreading of the equal right to marry, they have fought brilliantly and quite successfully. They never asked for guns.
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Koshembos, you’re right: if guns are people and corporations are people, is there any room left for people to be people in Scalia’s ideology? I don’t think so, particularly if these people are in any way outside of the acceptable mainstream.
Historiann, you’re so right about the bitter and corrosive effects of homophobic, racist, sexist and other prejudicial preachings put forward. When free speech is a one-way door at a university, it makes for a scary and disheartening scene.
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There is already a gun organization for gay/LBTQ folks; it’s called the Pink Pistols.
And now you know!
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Dr. H., please to be googling “Pink Panthers” + NYC:
http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/2010/10/pink-panthers.html
As I recall, the public stance was non-firearm, although my old brain recalls at least one firearms-training seminar sponsored by them. Their t-shirts were pink-on-black, of course…
They got sued out of their name, but as a witty commenter noted: “And now MGM has declared bankruptcy. Karma! “
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… koshembos, I think that’s overly fluffy and unrealistic. There have been as many ways of being gay as there are intersectional groups that have gay members.
What the heck did you think the whole gays-in-the-military mishegas was about? NOT about dying for one’s country, but protecting one’s country — which extended to protecting one’s family, through the heightened status the military class still have, in theory anyway. Along with those close-to-socialism benefits is the explicit right to use firearms, through proof of training and eased permit requirements.
If queers could serve openly, they could also *defend* themselves openly — by any means necessary. Overton-window-pushing or not, queer servicepeople brought firearms into the LGBT conversation, which only means those tools, for good or for ill, came out of the closet, too.
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When I read this story, my first thought was: isn’t exam week coming up at CU? If I was a student there, whether I smoked pot or not, I would be seriously pissed that I couldn’t study on the quad for the next two weeks (of beautiful weather) because the childish administrators decided to use virtual chemical warfare to render the quad uninhabitable. What utter jackasses…
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