What, you didn’t see #JeSuisSAE on Twitter after the upheaval at Oklahoma University over that racially charged fraternity chant?

No march for Oklahoma’s fraternities on behalf of the sanctity of free speech in the free West?

“We are all Charlie Hebdo,” pronounced  libertarian Nick Gillespie earlier this year. Speak for yourself Nick, though, to be sure, the loud mouth Okies have only been “blown away” figuratively, not literally.

But Hebdo was not a government organ, while the University of Oklahoma certainly receives federal funding and is subject, also, to federal anti-discrimination law.

So freedom of speech was not at issue in Hebdo, whereas it is here, although you wouldn’t know it from the commentary.

If we can lock arms in solidarity over our right to depict Mohammed as a camel-humping pedophile in Paris, surely we can lock arms in solidarity over our right to taunt  “n******”  with lynching, lest they crash Oklahoma fraternities….

and Eugene Volokh makes the constitutional case for that position here:

1. First, racist speech is constitutionally protected, just as is expression of other contemptible ideas; and universities may not discipline students based on their speech. That has been the unanimous view of courts that have considered campus speech codes and other campus speech restrictions — see here for some citations. The same, of course, is true for fraternity speech, racist or otherwise; see Iota Xi Chapter of Sigma Chi Fraternity v. George Mason University (4th Cir. 1993). (I set aside the separate question of student speech that is evaluated as part of coursework or class participation, which necessarily must be evaluated based on its content; this speech clearly doesn’t qualify.)

Meanwhile, can we wait a bit to find out what actually happened, before we make this another national racial moment?