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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsYou Can Hand Out Condoms on This Campus -- Just Not If They're to Prevent Pregnancy
Just eight miles of rolling Palouse hills separate the college towns of Moscow, Idaho, and Pullman, Washington, but for decades theyve existed as fiefdoms with rival laws. Back in the Eighties, when the drinking age in Idaho was still 18, students from Washington State University in Pullman would cross the state line to get blitzed in Moscow alongside University of Idaho undergrads. A few years ago, a weed shop opened just west of the state line in Washington, where Idaho state troopers are said to idle just beyond the parking lot, waiting to pull customers over the moment they cross into their jurisdiction.
Today, students are crossing the state line in search of reproductive health care and birth control no longer accessible to them in Idaho, says Katie Hettinga, a senior at the University of Idaho. After Roe v. Wade was overturned this summer, abortion became illegal in all but an extremely limited set of circumstances in Idaho, and thanks to a separate law passed by the reactionary state legislature, there is now an earnest debate over whether abortion can even be discussed openly on public college campuses.
On a Friday afternoon in late September, one month into the fall semester, employees at the University of Idaho received an email from the schools general counsel: seven bullet-pointed pages of legal advice on how to keep from running afoul of Idahos abortion laws. The memo outlined a long list of activities that could potentially be considered illegal, and thus were to be avoided, including promoting abortion and providing birth control for the purposes of preventing pregnancy. (It was probably still OK, the universitys lawyer wrote, to distribute condoms if their purpose was to prevent STDs.)
And while nothing in any of the laws technically barred employees from directing students to private groups or agencies of another state a reference, some believed, to the Planned Parenthood in Pullman the email advised employees that they must remain neutral on the subject of abortion in virtually any circumstance in which it might come up, or else risk criminal prosecution, fines, jail time, and a lifetime ban on state employment. Academic freedom, the letter warned, is not a defense to violation of law.
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/hand-condoms-campus-just-not-134421124.html
sarcasmo
(23,968 posts)muriel_volestrangler
(101,352 posts)That needs explanation in the article. It also needs, for that matter, someone to teach that lawyer the facts of life. And then to sack him for being unsuitable as a university lawyer. If he didn't understand sex, he should have asked someone before opining on it. Lawyers are expected to have a mental age above 12, especially when employed.
Hugh_Lebowski
(33,643 posts)that there's nothing in drivel they passed as law that might not have prompted the lawyer to come up with this opinion in a legally logical fashion?
I'm not saying that's the case but ... there might well be something like that, wouldn't shock me that much.
I'd also like to know the logic, however.
Hugh_Lebowski
(33,643 posts)Terrible, terrible, terrible.
Hermit-The-Prog
(33,400 posts)Roe, Roe, Roe your vote
against theocracy!
Republicans revoke your rights
and kill democracy!
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Got post-its?
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