Gallup Poll: Free Speech Threatened on College Campuses

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DETROIT (ChurchMilitant.com) - A recent survey of college students found most of them believe the campus climate stifles free speech.

A Gallup poll published Monday reveals that 61 percent of college students believe some of their peers are scared of stating unpopular opinions. The survey was conducted in 2017. This is a noticeable increase from 54 percent in 2016.

However, the data also reveals that a small but growing number of college students are OK with scaring their peers into silence. As Breitbart reports, 29 percent of students responded positively to the idea of banning kinds of speech that are deemed "biased" or "offensive." These findings show a growing divide between those who appreciate free speech and those who oppose what they label as hate speech.

In other news, Simmons College in Boston has recently issued an "anti-oppression" manual instructing students to avoid committing "microaggressions" — basically word choices that might accidentally irritate women, LGBTQ people or racial minorities, among others.

The concept of microaggressions has swept through college campuses in the United States and around the world.

An especially shocking part of the manual insists that "greeting someone [with] 'Merry Christmas' or saying 'God bless you' after someone sneezes conveys one's perception that everyone is Christian or believes in God."

Regarding the phrase "God bless you," Ian Miles Cheong commented, "Contrary to the guide's claim that the term is somehow offensive to non-religious people, no sane individual would find the common phrase, which has roots in Anglo-Christian culture, to be offensive."

Cheong writes for Daily Caller, The Escapist and Milo Yiannopoulos' website Dangerous.com. He calls himself an "apostate from the cult of social justice."

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