Why are they so common, especially on campus?
A student at the University of Wyoming has received a misdemeanor citation for a Facebook post that “allegedly threatened” a female UW student, the amusingly named Laramie Boomerang reports. The target of the post was Meg Lanker-Simons. The student who is accused of sending it is Meg Lanker-Simons.
CampusReform.org has the full text of the post except for a partly redacted four-letter obscenity. As this is the website of a family newspaper, we’ll rely on the Boomerang’s sanitized description:
The post was made April 24 to the UW Crushes page on Facebook.
It described Lanker-Simons as “that chick that runs her liberal mouth all the time and doesn’t care who knows it.”
The post also referenced a graphic, sexual act against the woman.
“One night with me and shes gonna be a good Republican (expletive),” the post read.
The message itself would appear to be protected by the First Amendment. As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor explained in Virginia v. Black (2003, citations omitted):
The First Amendment permits a State to ban “true threats,” which encompass those statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals. The speaker need not actually intend to carry out the threat. Rather, a prohibition on true threats protects individuals from the fear of violence and the disruption that fear engenders, as well as from the possibility that the threatened violence will occur. Intimidation in the constitutionally proscribable sense of the word is a type of true threat, where a speaker directs a threat to a person or group of persons with the intent of placing the victim in fear of bodily harm or death.
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