The Latest News from the Institute for Free Speech May 17, 2023 Click here to subscribe to the Daily Media Update. This is the Daily Media Update published by the Institute for Free Speech. For press inquiries, please contact [email protected]. In the News The College Fix: University president says legal precedent allowed him to cancel ‘lewd’ drag show By Blake Mauro .....West Texas A&M University President Walter Wendler was within his rights to cancel a campus drag show, his attorneys argued in a recently filed response to a First Amendment lawsuit brought against him by the student group Spectrum WT... In an argument to dismiss the lawsuit, filed May 5, Wendler’s attorneys...argue drag shows are not protected by the First Amendment because they do not meet the requirement to be considered “expressive conduct” under the FAIR ruling. That 2006 precedent was established in the Supreme Court ruling in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights... However, free speech activist and president of the Institute for Free Speech, David Keating, did not entirely agree with Wendler’s argument or the relevance of the FAIR case. “The FAIR ruling isn’t all that relevant to this case. In that litigation, law schools did not want to provide military recruiters equal treatment with other recruiters allowed on campus, arguing that it violated their associational rights,” Keating told The College Fix. “Mostly Wendler argues that drag shows are not expressive conduct, but that’s wrong.” The Courts St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Lawsuit by anti-abortion group challenges Carbondale ordinance creating clinic buffer zone By Michele Munz .....Anti-abortion activists filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday challenging the constitutionality of Carbondale ordinance that prohibits protestors from approaching people within 100 feet of a medical clinic. Though courts have struck down similar legal challenges in the past, the activists say that this time their case could make it to the conservative-leaning U.S. Supreme Court. “We feel very confident that at the end of the day we can get this case up to a place where it will be heard and we will be able to get justice for not just the folks in Carbondale, for their free speech rights to be upheld, but for folks around the country,” said Peter Breen, executive vice president of the Thomas More Society... Thomas More Society filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois on behalf of Coalition Life, which places volunteer sidewalk counselors outside of four clinics in Illinois in an effort to dissuade those going in from having an abortion. Congress Wall Street Journal: ChatGPT’s Sam Altman Warns Congress That AI ‘Can Go Quite Wrong’ By Ryan Tracy .....[The chief executive of ChatGPT creator OpenAI] Sam Altman said of AI technology at a Senate subcommittee hearing Tuesday, his first appearance before Congress[,] “If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.” Mr. Altman called for “a new agency that licenses any effort above a certain scale of capabilities and could take that license away and ensure compliance with safety standards.” ... Committee Chairman Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) was one of several senators to compare the rise of AI to the early days of the social-media industry, which grew up with little regulation from Congress. “When it came to online platforms, the inclination of the government was to get out of the way,” he said. “I’m not sure I’m happy with the outcome as I look at online platforms and the harms they have created…I don’t want to make that mistake again.” ... At Tuesday’s hearing, several lawmakers raised concerns about elections, fretting about how AI systems could be used to spread false information or otherwise manipulate voters. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.), chair of the subcommittee, started the hearing by playing a fake AI-generated recording of his voice reading an opening statement written by ChatGPT. He marveled at its realism, but also questioned what else it could create. “What if it had provided an endorsement of Ukraine surrendering or Vladimir Putin’s leadership?” he said, referring to Russia’s president. “The prospect is more than a little scary.” Candidates and Campaigns The National Interest: If China Targeted Canada’s Elections, America Must Act By Zachary R. Morgan .....In an episode of the hit TV show How I Met Your Mother, one of the characters drily explains that “the Eighties didn’t come to Canada until, like, ’93.” Today, Canadian cultural delay remains in full force. Just this year, the American 2016 presidential election seems to have finally arrived up north. This time, it is foreign interference by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) at issue. The Chinese have targeted America’s largest trading partner, our partner in continental air defense, and a founding member of NATO. Americans should take notice. As any American who even remotely paid attention to Russia’s efforts to sow chaos in the 2016 election can attest, the fog of foreign interference is disconcerting and frightening. While recent studies have suggested that these efforts did not sway a critical mass of voters, they did succeed in causing a significant portion of the American population to doubt the legitimacy of the Trump administration. Now, it’s Canada’s turn in the barrel. Free Expression Reason: When This Uvalde Parent Complained About a New Police Hire, He Was Banned From School Property By Emma Camp .....Adam Martinez's youngest son was at Robb Elementary on the day of the shooting—though thankfully he was physically unharmed—and, like many other parents, he became a vocal critic of the police department. However, in retaliation for his criticism, the school district banned him from school property—and school board meetings—for two years. On Monday, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) sent a demand letter requesting that the school lift its two-year ban on Martinez or face a lawsuit. "The First Amendment exists so that people can use their voices to advocate for social and political change," FIRE attorney Jeff Zeman said in a Monday press release. "Criticizing the government is protected speech, and Uvalde can't police it." Alliance Defending Freedom: ADF rates 75 major US corporations on respect for free speech, religious freedom in second annual Business Index .....On Tuesday, Alliance Defending Freedom announced the results of its second-annual Viewpoint Diversity Score Business Index, in partnership with Inspire Insight, a leading investment technology service that provides faith based investing data and ratings to thousands of institutions. The Business Index is the first comprehensive benchmark designed to measure corporate respect for free speech and religious freedom. It scored 75 publicly traded corporations in its year-two edition across forty-two performance indicators. The States CommonWealth: SJC punts on individual contributions to super PACs By Jennifer Smith .....The state’s highest court decided on Tuesday not to rule on whether limits can be placed on individual campaign contributions to political action committees, putting those who favor limits in a difficult position. The Supreme Judicial Court considered an initiative petition proposed in 2022 that would place a $5,000-per-year cap on contributions from individuals to independent expenditure PACs, also known as super PACs. Then-Attorney General Maura Healey decided in September not to certify the measure for the ballot, concluding it likely violated federal and state free speech protections. In a brisk 17-page decision published Tuesday, Justice Scott L. Kafker wrote that the ballot proponents’ failure to collect signatures during the 2022 cycle while the high court considered the case means the issue is no longer a live one. Though the court could have decided to take up the question anyway, it decided not to “unnecessarily” decide such a thorny constitutional question without a timely case in front of them. “If we were to decide this now moot question,” Kafker wrote, the court would have to interpret federal free speech protections that establish the floor for state constitutional protections, “deciding unnecessarily a question best left to the Federal judiciary.” ... The SJC decision comes one day before the Joint Committee on Election Laws is set to consider a bill that would impose the same contribution limitations. People United for Privacy: Alabama Legislature Unanimously Passes Personal Privacy Protections By Luke Wachob .....Less than a week after Indiana became the 16th state to pass the Personal Privacy Protection Act (PPPA), Alabama joined the trend when Governor Kay Ivey signed Senate Bill 59 on May 9. The bill has become law in three additional states this year – Kentucky, Indiana, and Alabama – and 17 overall. The PPPA protects Americans against unlawful collection and disclosure of their support for nonprofits by state agencies and imposes penalties on government officials who recklessly leak such personal information to the public. In so doing, the legislation codifies the Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta. For more than six decades, courts have repeatedly recognized that the First Amendment protects the right to give privately to nonprofits. The Detroit News: Michigan Democrats' early campaign finance bills bolster union influence By Craig Mauger .....A committee within the Democrat-controlled Michigan House advanced bills Tuesday that would help labor unions, which frequently support Democratic lawmakers' campaigns, raise money for political contributions. Democrats won control of both the state House and Senate for the first time in 40 years in November. The new proposals, approved by the House Elections Committee in party-line votes, would remove a ban on government bodies administering payroll deductions for political committees and would broadly allow automatic deductions to be set up for giving to labor union committees. The measures, House Bills 4230 and 4234, became two of the first three campaign finance law changes to reach the full Michigan House from the elections committee this year amid a series of ongoing and high profile criminal investigations into corruption by past Republican officials, including two former House speakers. Read an article you think we would be interested in? Send it to Tiffany Donnelly at [email protected]. For email filters, the subject of this email will always begin with "Institute for Free Speech Media Update." 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