About those anti-free speech PC kids
by digby
That political correctness is stifling our freedom:
A University of Missouri doctoral student plans to continue research for her dissertation on the effects of the state’s recently imposed 72-hour waiting period for abortions, despite a state legislator’s push to block the research, the student told Al Jazeera in an exclusive interview.
“I stand by my research project,” Lindsay Ruhr said Wednesday. “I feel that my research is objective, and that the whole point of my research is to understand how this policy affects women. Whether this policy is having a harmful or beneficial effect, we don’t know.”
State Sen. Kurt Schaefer, a Republican from Columbia, Missouri, who chairs the Missouri state senate’s interim Committee on the Sanctity of Life, sent a letter in late October to the University of Missouri calling Ruhr’s dissertation “a marketing aid for Planned Parenthood — one that is funded, in part or in whole, by taxpayer dollars,” according to a copy of the letter posted to HuffingtonPost.com. Schaefer called for the university to hand over documents regarding the project's approval and said that, because the University of Missouri is a public university, it should not fund research that he said would promote elective abortions. Missouri law prohibits the use of public funds to promote non-life-saving abortions.
[...]
A spokeswoman for the university (MU) expressed support for Ruhr’s academic freedom, but appeared to distance the school from the research.
“A doctoral student in the School of Social Work is completing research at Planned Parenthood as part of her dissertation,” university spokeswoman Mary Jo Banken told Al Jazeera. “She is employed at Planned Parenthood. She receives no scholarships from MU; nor is she the recipient of any grant money for this research.”
If you want to see real suppression of free speech, this is it:
[The]Committee on the Sanctity of Life, sent a letter in late October to the University of Missouri calling Ruhr’s dissertation “a marketing aid for Planned Parenthood — one that is funded, in part or in whole, by taxpayer dollars,” according to a copy of the letter posted to HuffingtonPost.com. Schaefer called for the university to hand over documents regarding the project's approval and said that, because the University of Missouri is a public university, it should not fund research that he said would promote elective abortions. Missouri law prohibits the use of public funds to promote non-life-saving abortions.
I've written a about the right's ongoing crusade to interfere with research andthe doctor patient relationship on guns and abortion before. I realize that it's really icky when students get all PC and everything but I wish that some of our liberal defenders of free speech would pay a little bit closer attention to the way the government under conservatives is actively engaging in censorship. It seems to me that's a bigger problem.
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