A professor has filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the University of Oregon after he was blocked on Twitter by university staffers for tweeting “all men are created equal” from the Declaration of Independence. The Institute for Free Speech said, “The First Amendment does not allow the government or its actors to ban individuals from public forums just because they disagree with the views those individuals express,” in a press release on the lawsuit.
Portland State University Professor Bruce Gilley filed a lawsuit on Thursday after he was blocked by the University of Oregon’s Equity and Inclusion Twitter account, according to a report by the College Fix.
On June 14, the Equity and Inclusion Twitter account tweeted, “You can interrupt racism,” and included a prompt encouraging viewers to fill in the blank, which read, “It sounded like you just said [blank]. Is that what you really meant?”
Gilley replied to the tweet, and filled in the blank by writing, “all men are created equal.” The professor was then blocked by the University of Oregon Twitter account for quoting the Declaration of Independence.
The lawsuit names Tova Stabin, the communication manager for the university’s Division of Equity and Inclusion, as the individual who blocked him on the account.
“Blocking also removed Bruce Gilley’s ‘all men are created equal’ reply from @UOEquity’s timeline and prevented other users from viewing it or interacting with it, and with Gilley, including followers of the @UOEquity account,” the lawsuit states.
The suit goes on to allege that the reason Stabin blocked Gilley is that, “she and her employer disagree with the viewpoint” that “all men are created equal,” and that Stabin “believes that Prof. Gilley’s opinion is critical of her employer’s DEI ideology and she wishes to suppress his viewpoint.”
Two other Twitter users who have expressed conservative views at the @UOEquity account have also been blocked, according to the lawsuit.
“Clearly it’s not that I need to read the University of Oregon’s Twitter account, but what is important is I need to make use of my role as a defender of academic freedom in higher education — to make sure government-funded universities comply with our Constitution,” Gilley told the College Fix.
The professor added that the university cannot simply unblock him to make the lawsuit moot.
“The case goes forward even if they unblock me tomorrow, because they could re-block me anytime and because — simply to unblock me would not show they had engaged in a change of their practices,” he said.
Gilley is represented by the nonpartisan First Amendment advocacy group, Institute for Free Speech, as well as the Angus Lee Law Firm.
“The First Amendment does not allow the government or its actors to ban individuals from public forums just because they disagree with the views those individuals express,” a press release from the institute states.
“The lawsuit asks the judge to order @UOEquity to unblock Professor Gilley and to issue a permanent injunction preventing the account’s manager and agents from discriminating on the basis of viewpoint when blocking users in the future,” the press release adds.
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