Karlo Kraljev (karlo.kraljev@email.t-com.hr) of the European Human Rights Panel is spitting mad. And it’s not because his spell-checker is still broken. It’s because he thought “My Apology to the European Human Rights Panel” was a satire. He claims that the article was satire because it claims that another article (“How to Bomb a Gay Bath House”) was satire, which is a claim he still refuses to accept.

I don’t know how Karlo Kraljev manages to come off like a victim of anti-gay oppression. After all, the European Parliament appears to have named him Secretary of Satire for the entire continent. And, in the following note, he informs me that I’m about to be banned from Europe altogether:

Mr. Adams we have informed the European Parliament of your activities, and we will ask the Commission to prohibit you from entering the European Union on the grouds [sic] that you are spreading hate, and calling for genocidal extermination of human beings only because of their sexuality. Not long ago our group has successfully fought for the same sanctions to be applied on the Jordanian radical cleric who wanted to murder Americans. We value all human life the same, you do not, and that is why you are a Fascist. You are right that Europe is socialist, and the people of Europe have stong [sic] influence over their government, this is why we assure you – this process (after two years) will end positively. Sicerely [sic];

European Human Rights Panel

When I first read this letter, it was hard to get over the fact that I would have to spend the summer at Wrightsville Beach watching American girls in bikinis instead of going to Europe to watch French women grow the hair under their armpits. But then a soothing thought entered my mind:

It is great to live in a country that would never grant to any government or government- sponsored entity the right to a) determine what is or is not satire, and to b) impose punishments upon speech it does not understand.

But that soothing thought was short-lived because I made a crucial mistake: I read the student newspaper published by the University of Rhode Island. According to the newspaper, the University of Rhode Island Student Senate denied the appeal of the College Republicans who had been punished for running a controversial “White Heterosexual American Male” scholarship advertisement. The ad was obviously satire because the scholarship has never actually been granted to anyone. In other words, like a gay unicorn, it does not really exist.

College Republican Chairman Ryan Bilodeau found himself in the rather Orwellian position of debating whether the "White Heterosexual American Male" scholarship violated senate rules prohibiting discrimination. In other words, here in America, he had to try to prove his innocence in the absence of any evidence of actual guilt.

If successful, perhaps Ryan could slowly explain to these college kids that satirical speech is protected by the United States Constitution, which cannot be trumped by the student handbook. This is more evidence that students need to spend more time in high school learning about the constitution and less time putting condoms on bananas.

Matt Yates, the student in charge of handing out the punishments, required that the College Republicans write a letter of apology to be printed in the student newspaper. The CRs were also sentenced to have all club activities approved by a student committee until February 2008.

The senate, with straight faces, actually debated whether the mock scholarship was a) protected free speech or b) trumped by the student by-laws. Then, Yates, showing all of the intellectual sophistication of a European gay rights activist, argued against its status as satire because the CRs never told him it was satire. Continued...