Michigan State University's YAF To Be Labelled A Hate Group

According to the venerable civil rights organization the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Michigan State University chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative student organinization, is a hate group.

In the April issue of the SPLC's magazine Intelligence Report, the SPLC will identify the MSU chapter...but not the national organization...as a hate group. As even the most casual reader might imagine, this raises some interesting questions about how we conceptualize hate and how this plays out in terms of political speech.

The SPLC's Intelligence Report grew out of one of the foundations of the SPLC, a program called Klanwatch. As the name indicates, Klanwatch was formed to investigate the criminal activities of the Klan, particularly those linked to hate crimes. As the direct links between the Klan and hate crimes dissipated as these groups grew more decentralized and as other threats such as "patriot" groups grew, Klanwatch became the Intelligence Project in 1998, and the Intelligence Report is their publication. The SPLC's Intelligence Project has been instrumental in providing the U.S. government and Federal and state law enforcement agencies the information that they often lack in the pursuit and prosecution of hate groups.

On the other side of this contentious situation are the Young Americans for Freedom. Tha YAF were founded in 1960 and use a statement by their founder called The Sharon Statement as their call to action. This statement, named for William F. Buckley's estate in Sharon, Connecticut, where it was adopted, reads as follows:

IN THIS TIME of moral and political crises, it is the responsibility of the youth of America to affirm certain eternal truths.

WE, as young conservatives believe:

THAT foremost among the transcendent values is the individual's use of his God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force;

THAT liberty is indivisible, and that political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom;

THAT the purpose of government is to protect those freedoms through the preservation of internal order, the provision of national defense, and the administration of justice;

THAT when government ventures beyond these rightful functions, it accumulates power, which tends to diminish order and liberty;

THAT the Constitution of the United States is the best arrangement yet devised for empowering government to fulfill its proper role, while restraining it from the concentration and abuse of power;

THAT the genius of the Constitution - the division of powers - is summed up in the clause that reserves primacy to the several states, or to the people in those spheres not specifically delegated to the Federal government;

THAT the market economy, allocating resources by the free play of supply and demand, is the single economic system compatible with the requirements of personal freedom and constitutional government, and that it is at the same time the most productive supplier of human needs;

THAT when government interferes with the work of the market economy, it tends to reduce the moral and physical strength of the nation, that when it takes from one to bestow on another, it diminishes the incentive of the first, the integrity of the second, and the moral autonomy of both;

THAT we will be free only so long as the national sovereignty of the United States is secure; that history shows periods of freedom are rare, and can exist only when free citizens concertedly defend their rights against all enemies…

THAT the forces of international Communism are, at present, the greatest single threat to these liberties;

THAT the United States should stress victory over, rather than coexistence with this menace; and

THAT American foreign policy must be judged by this criterion: does it serve the just interests of the United States?

Now let's look at the specifics of why the SPLC's Intelligence Project thinks Michigan State University's YAF chapter is a hate group and let's compare these specific instances to the Sharon Statement as a set of guiding principles for the national organization.

According to an article in the Lansing State Journal, the SPLC will designate the MSU chapter of the YAF as a hate group for two primary reasons:

1) Proposing that MSU should de-fund minority student organizations;
2) Proposing that there should be a "white student council" in MSU's student government.

In addition to these two specifics, the State Journal article also points out that the MSU chapter of YAF sponsored a "Catch An Illegal Immigrant Day" in 2006 and that YAF members had protested a Lansing city human rights ordinance with signs that read "Straight Power" and "End Faggotry."

Perhaps I'm guilty of thinking all conservatives are "literalists" (as many social conservatives claim to be Biblical literalists) or "strict constructionists" (as many conservatives claim to want their judicial nominees to be) and therefore I assume that strictness and literalness are communal virtues in the conservative world. Maybe I don't have the secret decoder ring or the right kind of glasses to read the invisible subtext, because I can't find a single word about race, sexual orientation, or immigration anywhere in the Sharon Statement. What I do see in this article about the actions of the MSU YAF is what both the SPLC and this author agree is hate.

On a closing note, right now there is a cultural battle ebbing and flowing across the Internets about philosophical ownership of Frank Miller's 300. As is usual for such fare, progressive folks point out that it's a movie adaptation of a graphic novel (a movie I enjoyed quite a bit) and that what we know of historic Sparta and the battle of Thermopylae doesn't jive with our current situation. Conservatives, as usual, cannot be encumbered by history and have claimed 300 as an allegory for Iraq (ignoring that we invaded Iraq, not the other way around).

As fate would have it, Michigan State University's mascot is Sparty the Spartan. When I read about what MSU's YAF chapter have been up to and I think about some of the ridiculous stunts our own state's various conservative campus organizations (sliding scale bake sales and "Catch An Illegal Immigrant Day") have pulled to highlight their downtrodden discrimination as the majority power in Washington D.C. for the last 6 years, I feel that this is what it really all comes down to for these folks: Cartoon histories and big foam heads. Our country's cultural, social and political future is just a game to them, something to be colored in between the lines and cheered on by a fist-pumping, jumping-jack performing mascot.