Banning Rugby
Via Reason, a college rugby team has been banned because, gasp, they sang boorish songs when drunk:
The University of Mary Washington permanently cancelled its student rugby team after evidence surfaced that team members had engaged in sexist chanting at an off-campus house party. All members of the team were also required to attend sexual assault training.
But while UMW's rugby team has 46 players, only 8 of them were even in attendance at the party—meaning that not only did a public university punish a few students for engaging in inappropriate (though constitutionally-protected) speech, it also punished other students who had nothing to do with said (again, constitutionally-protected!) speech.
The microaggression unfolded last November at a house party near the Fredericksburg, Virginia, campus, according to Jezebel's Erin Gloria Ryan. Some students, likely drunk, sang a demeaning song about raping corpses and "wiggling it" inside whores—inappropriate stuff, to be sure, though not really targeted at a specific entity in a threatening way. The chant apparently has its origins in rowdy "pub" songs. It's a curious tradition, though not one intended to inspire actual malice, it seems.
I played rugby for several years (for Harvard Business School, of all places) and never encountered a rugby club that did not have a repertoire of raunchy pub songs. It was a tradition, which I presume was copied from the mother country, that teams would share in singing of these songs over many drinks after a match. While often crude and offensive, they were known to all to be so. I can't remember anyone being somehow confused between what was in those songs and what was a correct way to comport oneself in society. We sang crude songs for a few hours, and then went back to crafting strategies for water meter manufacturers.
Leaving aside the first amendment issues and whether there is really any harmful behavior here, think for a moment about the nature of crime and punishment here. College rugby teams have comported themselves as such for literally scores of years without any blowback except for occasional disdain from the blue bloods (the inciting of which is probably half the reason for the exercise in the first place). No laws or written rules were broken and the team was comporting themselves in a way that had been at least implicitly tolerated for generations. Then all of a sudden the team is disbanded. No advance warning, no discussion in advance that such behavior would now be treated in the future as illegal.
