On the Right - Whom Do We Blame?(Young Americans for Freedom)(Brief Article)(Column)

NEW YORK, APRIL 10

There was a great event in Pennsylvania two weeks ago, but the background needs detailing.

A student chapter of Young Americans for Freedom at Penn State was organized and, as routinely is the case on that campus, applied to (no less) the Undergraduate Student Government Supreme Court for registration as a student organization. YAF's constitution contains a phrase, inherited from the founding organization statement in 1960, to the effect that human rights are "God-given" and therefore that human rights "derive from the right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force."

That sentiment (or affirmation) was not invented in Sharon, Connecticut, at the founding of the Young Americans for Freedom. The idea of God-given rights is about as novel in the United States as a speech by George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. But the supreme court of the undergraduate student government was not looking about for historical wavelengths. It ruled that YAF could not form a chapter so long as it contained that phrase in its constitution, inasmuch as to do so constituted religious "discrimination."

The Penn State YAF students drew a deep breath and filed an appeal to a student-faculty appeals board. That board unanimously reaffirmed the student supreme court in forbidding recognition to YAF.

The transaction caught the eye of Thor Halvorssen, a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, who serves now as Executive Director of a relatively new association called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (hence, FIRE). Alan Charles Kors, the president of FIRE, is a hefty intellectual, a historian who has written widely on 18th-century studies and has defended academic freedom vigorously. He wrote to the president of Penn State, Graham Spanier, noting straightforwardly that "it violates the anti-

establishment clause of the First Amendment for PSU officially to elevate non-belief over belief, to the extent that believers are prohibited from organizing themselves into a group aimed at promoting their religious views. . . . It is PSU," he wrote, "that has demonstrated an unconstitutional intolerance of religious students."