This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, March 27, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Even abhorrent speech deserves protection.

I spoke today with Greg Lucianov of the Foundation for

Individual Rights and Education about the cases of public Oklahoma University and

private Hithaca College and their struggles with student speech.

So at the University of Oklahoma I think probably everybody's heard about it by now

there was about 10 seconds of video of students in a fraternity, SAE, and engaged in a racist

chant, a really offensive racist chant that involved references even to lynching, using the N-word.

It's, there's no question that this was offensive.

But the reaction to it is very concerning in that we've watched a lot of you know supposed

experts on constitutional and First Amendment law come out and figure out a way

to say that this isn't actually a protected speech.

Meanwhile, you know, Eugene Volk and Chemerinsky, you know,

Jeffrey Stone, some of the real big names in constitutional law, they've all come out and said, no, this is protected.

And to their point, one of the only cases that really is on point is this case called

Papish from the 1970s that dealt with a cartoon on campus that depicted cops raping

the Statue of Liberty and the Supreme Court had no trouble figuring out this

is this is protected speech the fact that it's

offensive is actually all the more reason why it's protected speech so I don't

think there can be any question that this is protected now a caveat here I make no

bones about it.

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