Page 4 University Daily Kansan, September 3, 1980
Opinion
Banner policy weakens
The Kansas Board of Regents banner policy, at least in its vague form, is beginning to show signs of extinction. The University and the city of Lawrence have begun to hedge when it comes to enforcement.
For those who are opposed to the Regents ban on political banners at University-sponsored events, last week proved to be momentous. In five days, the University and city loosened their tight enforcement of the policy, which has fueled a continuing controversy for more than a year.
At KU's opening Convocation last Monday, protesters displayed several banners advocating free speech rights at KU. In addition, a number of protesters sat in the front row of Hoch Auditorium and wore shirts that spelled out FREE SPEECH. In what could prove to be a precedent, the University didn't confiscate any banners. And no one was hauled to police headquarters.
Four days later, the city dropped three-month-old charges against 12 protesters who scuffled with police after unfurling banners at last May's Commencement. Last year at about the same time, the city dropped its charges against a 1979 Commencement protester. But the explanations of the dropped charges irastically changed this time around.
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Last year, the city dropped charges against Ron Kuby, a student rights activist, because Kubu threatened to make his trial a political circus. The city backed down but still contended it had a solid case against him.
The city sang a different tone last Friday. Colt Knutson, city prosecutor, said the prosecution's efforts may have been futile unless the charges against the protesters have stood independent of the policy. Knutson also said that the charges could have resulted from actions taken by police.
Such an admission seems to indicate the city's reluctance to waste any more time with the banner policy. And Acting Chancellor Del Shankel's decision not to enforce the policy at Convocation evidently reflects a higher degree of tolerance toward the protesters.
in the past, University governance groups have voiced opposition to the banner policy and have urged that the policy be made more specific. The policy has as continued to enforce the vague ban政策 to the letter. That is, until last week.
letter. Shankel maintains that the Yet, Shankel maintains that the University will continue to enforce the banner policy and will do so until the Regents say otherwise. For better or worse, the city may not be around to help.
Victory for women suffrage only begins sexism battle
There really are a few things you can count on these days.
You can count on Jimmy Carter smiling. You can count on the Jayhawks losing a football game. You can count on winter, and summer. You're lucky, you can even count on spring.
For twenty-some years now, it's seemed possible to count on most everything and it's seemed that most everything has always been in your hands. You tend to call this "taking grants for granted."
Maybe that explains my astonishment upon realizing that women gained the right to vote in 1960, when they were not on the ballot.
AMY
HOLLOWELL
so natural a right have been denied until so
natural C'mon, our mothers are SS and they
can't be denied.
Archaic as it may now seem, the vote is something women have not always been able to count on. In fact, women's suffrage did not become a reality until the last of the necessary 36 states ratified the amendment late in August. The rationing ended a few months earlier, while the devised and determined campaigners had counted and winning from the start.
LIKEWISE, ANYONE born after 1920 has always counted on voting, the issue being not who could vote, but for whom to vote. In our first-grade classrooms, what a frivolous thought it would have been to omit the girls from the voting for class president! Those first-grade elections prumed us for the main event. Even in history class, we skimmed past the suffrage movement, as if the victory made study of the battle obsolete. We simply forgot the women and the fight, and took the right for granted.
Today, as we count on the vote as we always have, there are some other rights we should be able to count on, also. We should be able to count on, among other things, equal pay for equal work, day-care programs for our children, equality in athletic funding, and the right to control our own bodies. In short, we should be able to count on equal rights.
But when you talk women's rights, you count on opposition. Archaic, once again, as it may seem, there are people in this contemporary land of freedom and equality who wish to deny women their very basic natural rights. Sixty years after winning the vote, an amendment was passed for equal rights. Three states short of the 38 necessary for passage, the Equal Rights Amendment is in grave danger and, therefore, so are women's rights.
FOREMOST AMONG the opposition ranks is presidential candidate Ronald Reagan and his Republican Party, which, for the first time in 50 years, does not support the ERA. Apparently, if Reagan and his middle-aged white male supporters had their way, women would be second-class citizens forever, and the nation would revert to a nice, white, male America. This is outright denial of freedom and equality for half of the citizens of this country and is most clearly a giant step back centuries in time.
Frivolous, indeed, Archaic, indeed. Sexist,
indeed. And yes, discriminatory, indeed. The
Republican Party's anti-ERA plank is proof that you can't count on progress, on equality
and not on discrimination so proof that you can count on discrimination and
inequality, for a while anyway.
More than half a century after their foremothers won the vote, American women are still fighting for equal rights. These are contemporary women fighting forces of discrimination against women. Determined and devoted, they are counting on their country to insure them their rights.
After all, there really are some things you can count on these days, aren't there?
Videotaping policy should be erased
When students attend KU football games this fall they should be sure to smile because they will be on the KU Police Department's version of candid camera.
KU police will be videotaping KU football games this fall as part of an ongoing policy to videotape public events to assist in law enforcement, according to Jim Denney, director of KU police.
Denney is a member of a committee approved this summer to oversee the videotaping of public events. Other members of the committee include Greg Schackne, student body president; Robert McCormick, university president; general counsel, and George Worrell, chairman of the University Senate executive committee.
The committee was formed to insure that police follow guidelines set up for videotaping. Those guidelines include a provision that the tapes may not be used to build a record that could later be used against someone and that the tapes may not be used for officer training.
The guidelines also state that the tapping must be done openly and that the operator must be in uniform. In addition, a record of all tapping must be kept and sent to the chairman of SenEx, and the videotape committee will have the option of viewing any tape.
At an Aug. 22 committee meeting, Dennie said that tapping helped the police because it provided irrefutable evidence about incidents that occured while responding to a crime. He identified persons involved in the incidents.
Videotaping is not done as rampantly as people think, according to Denney, because the tape is only run when there is a disturbance in the crowd. The camera goes into the stands to check on a complaint.
Benney said that videotaping helped provide irrefutable evidence about incidents that occurred at public events, but he said that he could be obtained only under ideal conditions.
Although Denney claim that videotaping is useful, there are many problems that make its use problematic.
Denney admitted that at KU football games people couldn't be positively identified by the camera from across the stadium. Also, Denny said that in an incident, such as a fight in the
stands, the videotape may or may not show what actually happened.
For example, when an officer who is running the camera in the press box first sees a fight, he turns the camera on. But, it is impossible to
BRETT CONLEY
capture the incident that started the fight. When the police look at the videotape later they are often unable to distinguish an instructor from a dragged stranger who may has been dragged into the fuit.
Denney, of course, thinks the benefits of videotaping greatly outweigh the costs. But if the videotape cannot positively identify people across Memorial Stadium and cannot capture everything that happens in a disturbance, then the benefits of taming are marginal.
The benefits become more questionable in
light of the fact that the policy violates students' rights. Denney claims that if a person is in a public place they are subject to scrutiny, and a teacher is then therefore not a violation of their rights.
The simple solution to the videotaping problem is to stop videotaping altogether. Denney and KU police have continued to use videotape because no one has told them to stop.
But where does the taping stop? Why not set up cameras along Jayhawk Boulevard and even in classrooms to make sure that no illegal activities occur in any public places on the KU campus? The videotaping of public events is the first step in that direction.
Denney has said that if the videotape committee recommended that the use of videotape at public events be abandoned, then he would abide by their recommendation.
Therefore, a quick solution is both necessary and possible. Robert Cobb, Vickie Thomas, George Worth and Greg Schnacke should put their committee out of business and restore students' rights by recommending that the videotaping of public events stop immediately.
To the editor:
Letters to the Editor Preacher force feeds idiocy
Last Wednesday marked my first exposure to "wowerism" and I must admit it wasn't as bad, as sickening and as insulting as I had thought. It was by no means a pleasant experience; it was a learning experience. Fundamentalism lives! But as last Wednesday's humiliations proved, the latter such as may be preached by Mr. Smock is lost to any crowd with anModicum of education.
Sure in the bucolic backwalls of this great land, such prattile is listened to reverently, but when it charges blindly into the barbarity of campus life, where the Chevrolet cross is worshiped and beer is the sacrament, the fundamental idiocies of Smock aren't tolerated.
Smock was confronted by taunts and jeers; he was confronted with both seriously and scholarly rebuttals. And he replied to all of them. But when it came to the beliefs of individuals, beliefs that were anathema to his, then, with a glimmer of satisfaction in his eyes, he unabashedly condemned them to hell. He then said Christians were the most tolerant people in the world.
Smock is a man of conviction. But he is sincere? Ten years ago he was a libertine hippie. Today he regurgitates religious doctrine as eagerly as he ingested drugs so few years ago. I am confident that he had goodness of what he says, but I can't accept Smock's views as he promulgates them.
he claimed that he saw a light. Maybe so. And if so, then I toast his breakthrough. But I can't respect him for trying to force his light on others. He has never been an ally of them in its own time, and in its own manifestation.
No, Smock didn't arouse my ire as he did to many others that saw him. He showed me a man of strong conviction who was proud of his beliefs. He showed me an intolerant Christian not so much as eager to win converts as to display himself a man of God.
He showed me a man inimical to my way of thinking. And as everyone watched him darting back and forth within the confine he set up for us, who would glance at an unappreciative audience, I pitted him.
Andrew deValpine Prairie Village sophomore
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