We recently reported that after Stanford University’s student government refused to help fund an upcoming traditional marriage conference, calling the topic “hate speech,” campus administrators agreed to foot the bill for the security required for the event.

And, despite numerous complaints about its thuggery, the student bureaucrats assert that they did nothing wrong.  The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) files this report.

In the wake of its heavily criticized, viewpoint-based retraction of funding to the Stanford Anscombe Society (SAS) student group for a conference on traditional values and marriage, Stanford University’s student government has ruled that the government’s Graduate Student Council (GSC) did not violate the group’s rights under Stanford rules….

…The Constitutional Council’s May 17 ruling (PDF) rejected SAS’s request to restore its funding, stating, “We do not find that the denial or revocation of funding constitutes a prohibition or abridgement of free speech.” The ruling supported its conclusion using bizarre rationales, such as the argument that “[t]he GSC did not pass legislation to prevent the event from taking place.” While the Constitutional Council expressed concern about the potential for viewpoint discrimination, it nonetheless declined to intervene, arguing that “there is not an explicit clause in the [ASSU] Constitution that protects against discrimination in terms of funding.” The ASSU Constitution does, however, contain an explicit provision mirroring the exact wording of the First Amendment, under which such discrimination is impermissible.

“The Constitutional Council’s opinion is a mess,” said Peter Bonilla, Director of FIRE’s Individual Rights Defense Program. “Its reasoning is nearly incomprehensible and it displays a severe lack of understanding of the principles of freedom of expression. It fails on the whole to inspire trust in Stanford’s student government as a fair arbiter of student rights.”