Last fall, Walter Kehowski, a mathematics professor at Glendale Community College in Arizona, got himself in hot water for having emailed George Washington’s Thanksgiving address to his faculty colleagues. Several of them attacked Kehowski for creating a “hostile environment” because they disliked the other material on Pat Buchanan’s website, where the address by George Washington was posted.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) rose to Professor Kehowski’s defense, protesting to the chancellor of the community college system and eliciting a great deal of bad press for the system. The result: on June 22 the system agreed to reinstate Kehowski. You can read FIRE’s press release here.

I can’t think of a clearer instance than this of the way that the “hostile environment” language in federal antidiscrimination law can be used as a sword by narrow-minded fanatics to harm others whose opinions “offend” them.