Inappropriate Content: Kakistocracy©

Here's something from the things to lookforward to this October:

WASHINGTON, May 2 - The Supreme Court agreed today to consider a case involving national defense, concepts of patriotism and free speech and, not incidentally, billions of dollars in federal money.

The justices announced that they would review a lower-court ruling, in favor of 25 law schools, that universities may bar military recruiters from their campuses without risking the loss of federal aid. Arguments will be heard in the justices' next term, which begins in October.

This demonstrates, in it's own odd little way, how mild the tensions are between the services and the Ivory Tower set. What can I say? It's difficult to picture some Air National Guard recruiter making the rounds of Kent State.

Of course, I don't want to be seen as drawing a comparison between the Iraq War and Vietnam. Especially since the law schools in the case are, in the court documents at least, opposed to “Don't Ask, Don't Tell,” and not the war. I merely wanted to suggest that the animosity between the college world and the military world is not what it once was, and this court case will reflect that.

This particular clash in the “culture war” is likely to go relatively unnoticed, especially if the Jackson verdict comes in during October, or if the war takes a turn for the worse. Of course it'll get a few days in the limelight and go into everyone's lists of greivances, but it won't seem earth-shaking.

Not at first, anyway. But there is an important decision being made here: just how many rights do we now invest in our Armed Forces? Universities are things, not people, and have no right to free speech; that's why those attempts to ban those “affirmative action bakesales#&148; are so much more egregious and serious than the sales themselves, which are really rather half-baked.

But remember: the government has even less right to free speech than the universities. These are not people going to universities praising the military. These are government employees doing a job for which they are paid good money by the federal government. So while the rights of the individully nearly always trumps the “rights” of a university, the “rights” of the government do not.

The government should argue that military recruiters perform a vital service to the public and therefore the universities right to bar them should be overridden. If they argue that the universities have no right to bar the recruiters, then they're admitting that the recruiters do not, in fact, perform a vital public service. Or, worse, if they merely claim that the military recruiters perform a vital service, but don't explain what that service is—“because it's obious, and if you don't get it, you're one of them,” Ann Coulter will say—then you'll know you're really being fed a line of bullshit.