Young America’s Foundation — represented by the Institute for Free Speech (IFS) — filed a federal lawsuit against Golden West College in Huntington Beach, California, this week for the school’s multiple First Amendment violations surrounding student attempts to form a Young Americans for Freedom chapter.
Filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California on behalf of YAF student activists Matin Samimiat and Annaliese Hutchings along with Young America’s Foundation, the complaint explains how Golden West College engaged in a pattern of viewpoint discrimination and other activity that violated the First Amendment.
As the IFS lawsuit notes, “[c]ensorship is a cancer upon any society in the world” but, “at Golden West College, the censor might threaten students with expulsion for saying so, because it may hurt people impacted by cancer. Indeed, Golden West’s chief censor, Defendant Stephanie Smallshaw, employed that logic to threaten students for calling illegal immigration a societal cancer.”
More from the complaint:
Likewise, declaring that “Hamas is a terrorist organization and they must be wiped form the face of the Earth” can end a Golden West students’ academic career, because some students do not believe that Hamas is a terrorist organization, and such “offensive language” could supposedly encourage violence.
However, “Go back to your f*cking country” is acceptable at Golden West, if directed at students who should know better than to use cancer metaphors or call for the eradication of terrorist organizations.
Of course, there is no way for students to truly know what speech is or isn’t covered under Golden West’s disciplinary code. A fair guess is that politically conservative speech is risky. But in any event, Golden West’s code is vague, overboard, and discriminates based on viewpoint, all in violation of the First Amendment.
Additional details regarding Golden West College’s violative conduct is outlined in the full filing here.
With this latest legal action, YAF and IFS seek preliminary and permanent injunctions prohibiting enforcement of the rule against “hateful behavior,” a judicial declaration that the disciplinary code is unconstitutional, $17.91 in nominal damages (representing the year the First Amendment was ratified), and attorney fees.
This lawsuit is a continuation of YAF’s decades-long winning record of defending conservative students’ rights whenever and wherever they come under attack by administrators. When our students are under attack, YAF has their back.
