Pot, Kettle. Kettle, Pot.

For those of you at home in the blogging audience with those cheap, knock-off, brass irony meters, you better stop reading until you invest in a titanium model.

Becuase the Religious right is protesting tolerance.

You say that I'm an alarmist, because your meter is scarcely twitching?

Wait, there's more. The tolerance so exercising the "Religious Right" (sic) is Georgia Institute of Technology's conduct code banning speech critical of certain sexual orientations.

So the famously intolerant are protesting the famously tolerant for their tolerance that is intolerant orthodoxy codified.

According to the article:

The religious right aims to overturn common tolerance programs: diversity training that promotes acceptance of gays and lesbians, speech codes that ban harsh words against homosexuality and anti-discrimination policies that require college clubs to open membership to all.

And it isn't just at GIT (an acronym that just begs to be followed by "darnnit") where the intolerant are fed up with the intolerance of the tolerant. At Cal State University, Long Beach (full disclosure: I attended CSU LB), students are demanding the school recognize Every Nation Campus Ministries, which intends to explicitly exclude "anyone who considers homosexuality 'a natural part of God's order'."

The students say denying them recognition -- and its attendant benefits, such as funding -- violates their free-speech rights and discriminates against their conservative theology. Christian groups at public colleges in other states have sued using similar arguments. Several of those lawsuits were settled out of court, with the groups prevailing.

In California, however, the university may have a strong defense in court. The California Supreme Court recently ruled that the city of Berkeley was justified in denying subsidies to the Boy Scouts because of that group's exclusionary policies. Eddie L. Washington, the lawyer representing Cal State, argues the same standard should apply to the university.

"We're certainly not going to fund discrimination," Washington said.

In this particular indoor-outdoor freestyle repellance contest, university speech codes and their attendant funding policies win hands down. If there is one institution that should study, understand, and assiduously adhere to the tenets of free speech, academia is it.

Darn. There goes another irony meter.

I hope the universities get thrown to the lions.

I also hope, but, given irony's awesome power, seriously doubt, that the aforementioned Christians are just as devoted to free speech when someone pens a cartoon depicting certain parts of their Scripture as immoral, anti-human, nonsense.