Yale Law School – Memphis Flyer

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee said a pro-LGBTQ protest at Yale University was “shameful” and said the groups targeted there — including an anti-LGBTQ group — were “welcome in Tennessee anytime.”

Protesters interrupted a Federalist Society event on campus earlier this month that featured Kristen Waggoner, an anti-LGBTQ speaker, according to Yale Daily News. Waggoner is general counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, an organization that has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The group has supported the re-criminalization of sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ adults in the U.S., has defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people abroad, and more, according to the SPLC.

The event also featured Monica Miller, an associate at the American Humanist Association. That group says it “advocates progressive values and equality for humanists, atheists, freethinkers, and the non-religious across the country.”

Lee said Thursday he signed a letter against the protest organized by the drafters of the Philadelphia Statement, a free-speech statement against “social media mobs, cancel culture, campus speech policing,” and more.

Lee’s link to the Yale letter shows no signatories, only “The Undersigned.” However, The Washington Free Beacon, the conservative news site, said the letter had been signed by “Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), nine members of the House of Representatives, and the governors of Tennessee, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Mississippi, and Idaho.”

The letter blasts the ”the deeply disturbing incident” saying the speakers at the event were met with “a vitriolic mob of Yale Law students intent on silencing them.” The letter says “instead of engaging with the panelists, a shocking number of Yale Law students hurled constant insults and obscenities at them and tried to prevent them from speaking and being heard.” The “shameful conduct” also included stopping, shouting, banging on walls, all “making it difficult to hear the panel.”

Lee said he signed the letter to urge Yale leaders to act. In a pivot, though, he took the opportunity to promote his idea for a new state school he said would be an “antidote to the cynical, un-American behavior we are seeing at far too many universities.”

Here’s Lee’s statement in full:

“I signed a letter to Yale Law School urging administrators to address a student mob that violently disrupted a bipartisan event about free speech and political discourse. The behavior is shameful but it speaks to a growing trend in higher-education where First Amendment freedom is taken for granted and often held in contempt.

“We are endeavoring to establish the University of Tennessee Institute for American Civics to be the antidote to the cynical, un-American behavior we are seeing at far too many universities. The Institute for American Civics will be a flagship for the nation — a beacon celebrating intellectual diversity at our universities and teaching how a responsible, civic-minded people strengthens our country and our communities.

“Representatives from Alliance Defending Freedom and the American Humanist Association, who had such a terrible experience at Yale, are invited to join us in Tennessee anytime.”

D’Army Bailey

Along with the sadness that came with our learning on Sunday that the great D’Army Bailey had died of cancer was, first, surprise, because the eminent lawyer/actor/author who was elected a Circuit Court judge last year for

the second time in his life, had been an active presence in the world right up until the end — participating, for example, in a spirited forum in April at the University of Memphis law school on the subject of the 1968 sanitation strike and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

But, after we had digested the reality of Judge Bailey’s passing, another more soothing thought occurred to us: If there was one factor that motivated D’Army Bailey in life, it was the twin pursuit of equality and justice, qualities that fused into a single idea in his mind, and in the mind, also, of his brother Walter, a longtime county commissioner — the two of them forming a tandem over the years dedicated to the eradication of every vestige of discrimination in either the private or the public sphere.

We took some satisfaction, then, that before he died, D’Army Bailey had seen the beginnings of final success for a cause that was important to him, and which was a continuing preoccupation for his brother Walter — the de-sanctification, as it were, of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest as a symbol of the racist past. Bailey had to know that the Memphis City Council had voted unanimously to remove the statue of Forrest on horseback from a park that no longer bore his name.

D’Army Bailey was a gentle, sensitive man, at home in any company, though his pursuit of justice had forever embroiled him in controversy. A graduate of Booker T. Washington and Clark College, Bailey migrated after graduation from Yale Law School to the San Francisco area, a hotbed of revolutionary ideas in the 1970s. Once there, he pitched into the ferment, got himself quickly elected to the Berkeley City Council and almost as quickly was subjected to a recall election that forced him out. He returned to Memphis to practice law with his brother, but the zeal to pursue human justice was still with him, and, in the course of time, that zeal became the energy that allowed him to midwife into being the National Civil Rights Museum on the Lorraine Motel site of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination.

Though he had ample helpers, both in and out of government, the museum was his idea, his creation, and it will be his monument to the world.

He also left for posterity two books on civil rights and charming, credible appearances in several movies, including The People vs. Larry Flynt, which was filmed here in Memphis, so we will still have traces of him in action to cherish.