But there have been rumblings about this insidious organizations. Is it dedicated to the chauvinist belief that women should stay barefoot and pregnant in the home, and have no business in the courtroom? Is it a sexist group? Have men in today's society NOT yet learned that they have no rights to assemble? Have they not heard women have a right not to be offended?
Even worse - is there an unsaid implication that it's the WHITE Men's Law Caucus? Are they all racists, too?!?
This culminated in a complaint to the Student Bar Association. From the agenda for today's meeting:
Some women at UWLS were offended by the idea of a Law Men's Caucus, and reported their concerns to an SBA board member. Should the students themselves fail to raise their concerns direct at the SBA meeting, the SBA board member will do so on their behalf.
So - the implication is that someone is asking us to disband our loose little group, and to ban a form of expression at the school by not allowing the T-shirts as a form of hate speech against women. They'll probably demand an apology, too. They won't get it from me. If it comes to that, I'll wear my shirt every stinkin' day.
There is, of course, a UW Law Women's Caucus, and good for them. My wife is an attorney, and I understand that there are unique issues that women face in this profession. I don't think the LWC is involved - in fact, I just talked to a fellow student who's on the LWC board, and she thought the MLC shirts were "hilarious."
So what's the problem? Is being 60% of the student body not enough for today's women? Are a bunch of guys getting together and grunting and scratching and talking about issues that concern them such a terrible thing? Are there no unique issues that impact men? How many more women do we need as Deans before we're not discriminating against women any more? Is Dean Knight a raging sexist? Is the Seattle legal community REALLY a bastion of "old boys" who don't want to hire women? Seriously?
When I see a Che Guevara T-shirt, I'm offended. I hate seeing the thoughtlessly anti-conservative, "Republicans are baby killers and war mongers" fliers, shirts, and posters littering the campus. Snarky anti-Bush and anti-conservative comments by professors, ubiquitous in this most liberal of law schools in this most liberal of cities, is an irritation you just learn to live with. But as obnoxious as all those things can be, it would never occur to me to complain to the Student Bar Association about it, or demand they be censored or forced to apologize. I guess free speech at this school only extends to transients looking at porn in our law library.
The T-shirts were, in part, a tongue-in-cheek ribbing of some students who are perceived as taking themselves a little too seriously. This outrage seems to prove that perception was correct.
UPDATE: The SBA complaint went no where, but the MLC spokesman got in a T-shirt plug in. A victory for sanity. Awesome.
