RUSH: The headline: ‘Compassion: Students Forgive Virginia Tech Killer — Students say he’s a human first, a murderer second,’ and a pull quote (this is from a CBS story about it), ‘Cho Seung-Hui lived eight-thousand, four-hundred, and eighty-nine days. I and no reasonable person, or deity, could or should allow the events of one of [those days] to discount the other eight-thousand, four-hundred, and eighty-eight.’
That’s what’s on a website of 50-odd students, and I just mention this to you because it dovetails, illustrates what we were talking about. Even now, some 50 students want to look at the good works that the guy supposedly did and say that what he did by shooting 32 people earlier this week shouldn’t — shouldn’t! — discolor his reputation because he’s ‘a human first,’ and a murderer second. They were trying to forgive him and so forth. Well, I understand forgiveness. There’s never a debate about that, but it’s the thought process. I mention this to you not really to criticized the students. I’m not doing that. This is how they’ve been raised. This is how they’ve been taught. This is political correctness. This is non-judgmentalism. Moral relativism is exactly what this is. Moral relativism. Well, yes, he did this, buuuut how about the other 8,000-plus days of his life? ‘Who are we to condemn what he did?’ is, I guess, the theme here. Now, I don’t know about you, but I have been treated to a number of newspaper stories about this. I guess the pièce de résistance on this is a story by Tamar Lewin in the New York Times. ‘Laws Limit Options When a Student is Mentally Ill.’
Now, listen to this: ‘Federal privacy and anti-discrimination laws restrict how universities can deal with students who have mental health problems. For the most part, universities cannot tell their parents about their children’s problems without the student’s consent.’ So you bring the kid in, you analyze, you study, and you discover the student’s insane. You gotta ask the student, ‘Can we inform your parents?’ They cannot release any information in a student’s medical record or their grades without consent, ‘And they cannot put students on involuntary medical leave, just because they develop a serious mental illness. Nor is knowing when to worry about student behavior, and what action to take, always so clear.’ Well, it might be clearer to parents if they were allowed to know. But stick with me on this because you may not know where I’m going, and you will when I get there. The headline: ‘Laws Limit Options When a Student is Mentally Ill — ‘At the University of Missouri, if someone makes a suicide attempt, they mandate four counseling sessions, for example,’ said Dr. Kadison, an author of ‘College of the Overwhelmed: The Campus Mental Health Crisis and What To Do About It.’
‘Universities can find themselves in a double bind. On the one hand, they may be liable if they fail to prevent a suicide or murder. After the death in 2000 of Elizabeth H. Shin, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who had written several suicide notes and used the university counseling service before setting herself on fire, the Massachusetts Superior Court allowed her parents, who had not been told of her deterioration, to sue administrators for $27.7 million. The case was settled for an undisclosed amount…. Last month, Virginia passed a law, the first in the nation, prohibiting public colleges and universities from expelling or punishing students solely for attempting suicide or seeking mental-health treatment for suicidal thoughts.’ Well, all right, now what do we have here? What we have here is the law gets everybody off the hook! Let me tell you something about this New York Times story.
The purpose of this New York Times story is to get the university off the hook and to get everybody else off the hook, except the NRA. I know the Drive-By Media and I know liberals, and the purpose of this is to get everybody off the hook. But here are the questions we need to ask. ‘Laws Limit Options When a Student is Mentally Ill’ Well, guess what we have? Every one of these laws also provides everybody involved with an alibi. They can all raise their hand and say, ‘It’s not my fault. It’s the law! We couldn’t do anything.’ So we have this excuse. ‘It’s the law.’ Well, who made the laws? The people who make the laws are among the spectators looking at this as though they had no impact in it! But we all know who makes laws. They are made by human beings, and sometimes for selfish and stupid reasons. Laws are made for money and power. Many laws are not made to protect us from anything. They can cause a ripple effect of horrible, unintended consequences. These laws that protect college students also remove their parents from their lives.
It takes the responsibility of the parent away, gives it to the university but then it ties the hands of the university to act because the law says, ‘Not only can you not tell the parents what’s going on with the kid, we can’t do anything about the kid.’ Who writes the laws? It’s insane. It’s stupid! It started out feeling like a good thing. ‘Oh, this is really great. We’re going to be compassionate. We’re going to be understanding. We’re going to be tolerant of these people that have problems,’ and we end up making everybody prisoners to them! We treat laws as though they’re gifts from God because they come from Government. But they are not gifts from God. They are gifts, if you will, from supremely fallible men and women, and they can be changed and they can be revoked, but that almost never happens because we worship laws. We need to be focusing. Everybody is upset about the university and everybody is upset about the… Look, if we’re going to have a story, ‘Laws Limit Options When a Student is Mentally Ill,’ well, who writes the laws? Who comes up with these newfangled ideas?
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s Jerry in Phoenix. Jerry, you’re up first today. It’s great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Good day, professor. How you doing?
RUSH: Fine, sir.
CALLER: All right. You also have the problem where you had the ACLU and other socialist rights groups, won’t allow us to do anything with the homeless. When then-Mayor Giuliani was trying to help the homeless, for example, they were like taking them off the streets and putting them in like drug treatment and —
RUSH: Well, you know, that’s right. This goes back to the early nineties when the PC crowd and the ACLU said, ‘You can’t keep mentally unstable or deranged people locked up! You’ve gotta let ’em loose. You gotta let ’em out. You’re violating their civil rights.’ It’s been expanded now to go all over the place. You know, this New York Times story about laws — The university’s hands are tied. They can’t tell the parents. They can’t expel the students — is outrageous. These policies allow predators to roam this campus (which is gun-free, by the way) for four years, until he finally lashed out — and this underscores everything we were talking about here, about political correctness, and how it is what needs to be banned, not guns. So no parents, no gun carrying allowed, and this leaves students to the devices of the PC crowd that run these places — and this has become the priority above the safety of other students. ‘So mental health experts emphasize that, whatever a college’s concerns about liability, the goal of campus policies should be to maximize the likelihood that those who need mental-health treatment will get it.’
I’m going to tell you: as long as this is the view, no campus is safe. ‘Last month, Virginia passed a law, the first in the nation, prohibiting public colleges and universities from expelling or punishing students solely for attempting suicide or seeking mental-health treatment for suicidal thoughts.’ This underscores the depth of the problem we face today, raising and educating kids. Because once again, as political correctness does (and political correctness equals liberalism), liberalism focuses on the people they think are victims, and proclaims that they’re victims because of their minority status and that there’s an oppressive majority (whatever it’s made up as), that are contributing to these people’s problems. So we can’t discriminate against them, and those that we would consider normal in society end up being not protected, in exchange for all of these rights for the genuinely mentally disturbed, the nutcases out there. As long as this exists on college campuses around the country, not one of them is going to be safe.