Roxana Vasquez | Arizona Daily Wildcat

There’s lots to post on today, but for now the quickest one I can put out is the original text of the letter I sent to the Wildcat, which I thought was much more eloquent and powerful than the Wildcat’s…uh…okay I’ll stop.

Among the most shallow possible responses to recent offensive speech at the University of Arizona, examples among which have been graphic pictures of pregnancy abortions and “gangsta”-themed parties, are calls for university administration to censor such speech. Neither the U.S. Constitution nor traditions of natural rights assert that one has the right to be protected from offensive speech. In fact, both assert that such speech ought to be protected. One who manages not to be exposed to offensive speech during a four-year college career should report immediately to the Administration building to request a tuition refund for not having learned anything.

Thankfully, the administration does not look to be taking any action to censor these examples of protected speech. In the wake of feminists selling candies resembling female anatomy on the mall, one observes that men and women with self-esteem have not been attempting to invoke the censorship of feminists’ current lyrical bastardization of the Australian folk song “Waltzing Matilda” for fear that our brothers and sisters from Down Under may otherwise become offended.

On a campus such as this, one also observes with genuine gratitude that opponents of feminists’ recent speech have chosen not to respond in turn by selling candies resembling male anatomy and hopes this remains so.

Garrett P. O’Hara
political science senior

Ironically, it just had to occur on the day the Wildcat is publishing my letter (or some messed-up version of it) that there are allegations coming out of the ASUA Senate against the ASUA Appropriations Board for cutting more funding than was justified and text-messaging the word “vagina” around. It is already well known that current appropriations board members tend to be more conservative than the senators, but the appropriations board is supposed to be nonpolitical.

In a Federal body this would be easy: stop funding everybody. I’m not advocating we move to that kind of system; ASUA club funding is a fact of life here, and it requires checks and balances in order to ensure fairness in the process. Allegations indicate that the board was liberally-biased in the past, the proper response to which is not to run a conservatively-biased board. I surely hope this isn’t what we’ve concocted, is it?

I’m not quite outraged one way or the other quite yet, but somebody had better explains this to me and the rest of the student body. Is the “Vagina Warrior” (which by the way is an insult to the military) lying about appropriations board members joking about the aforementioned withheld word? Is the appropriations board exhibiting conservative bias against a student organization with rights just like every other club, no matter how disgusting their ideas are?

My first class today is at 11 a.m., which I hope conveys a message that I got up this morning at 5 a.m. to get schoolwork done, and instead I’m defending “Vagina Warriors” ad nauseam for an hour and having no time to cover the elections as I promised. Is there something wrong here?