WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING

It’s no surprise that victims’ rights activists and their allies are furious about the U.S. Education Department’s proposed changes to Title IX, the federal statute that deals with sex and gender discrimination on campus. It is surprising, however, to see the American Civil Liberties Union joining in this chorus. The ACLU has long defended the rights of accused terrorists, criminals, neo-Nazis, and the Westboro Baptist Church. The group works tirelessly to protect due process, even for the least sympathetic among us.

Yet the ACLU has condemned the new Title IX rules, declaring on Twitter: “The proposed rule would make schools less safe for survivors of sexual assault and harassment, when there is already alarmingly high rates of campus sexual assaults and harassment that go unreported. It promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused and letting schools ignore their responsibility under Title IX to respond promptly and fairly to complaints of sexual violence.”

I am astonished to see the ACLU take the position that a government policy gives an accused person too many rights, especially when these rights are things the ACLU has generally supported. In other words, they are not weird new rights invented out of thin air. These are standard protections that regrettably were not applied to campus sexual misconduct adjudication during the Obama years. The Title IX reforms ... greatly strengthen due process protections for students accused of sexual misconduct, and they relieve colleges of the burden of investigating suggestive speech that should be permissible on free speech grounds.

Robby Soave, Reason