'Full and robust public debate,' Bogus style

There's not much in this article to surprise anyone paying attention to gun issues. Yes--Obama was on the board of the hugely anti-gun Joyce Foundation. And yes--the Joyce Foundation has doled out many millions of dollars to various citizen disarmament groups. And yes--Obama believed enough in the Joyce Foundation's agenda that he considered leaving politics to become the foundation's president. All of that is old news.

I did find something from the article mildly amusing, though.

Obama’s eight years on the board of the Joyce Foundation, which paid him more than $70,000 in directors fees, do not in any way conflict with his campaign-trail support for the rights of gun owners, Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for Obama’s presidential campaign, asserted in a statement issued to Politico this week.

LaBolt stressed that the foundation, which has assets of about $935 million, doesn’t take “detailed policy positions,” but rather uses its grants to “fuel a dialogue about how to address public policy issues like reducing gun violence.”

Ben, you must have superhuman balance, because that kind of spinning would leave a normal human too dizzy to function.

Obama certainly seems to want to sweep his years of advocacy for extreme gun prohibitionist policies under the rug. From getting the endorsement of the pretty blatantly fifth column "American Hunters and Shooters Association" (an endorsement I think he would actually be better off without, if he really wants to reassure gun owners), to his rather laughable claim that a questionnaire about his positions in which he voiced support for an outright ban of handguns was filled out by a staffer, without his knowledge, despite his handwriting being on it; he seems to want voters (at least small town Pennsylvania and Indiana voters) to believe that the consistency with which he voted for citizen disarmament policies does not accurately reflect how he would approach the presidency.

But my favorite part of the article was this:

But the Joyce Foundation in 1999 awarded $84,000 to the Chicago-Kent College of Law for a symposium on the theory that the Second Amendment does not protect an individual’s right to bear arms, but rather only a state’s right to arm its militia.

“No effort was made to include the individual right point of view,” its organizer, Carl T. Bogus, a Roger Williams University School of Law professor, wrote in one of several law review articles stemming from the symposium. “Full and robust public debate is not always best served by having all viewpoints represented in every symposium. Sometimes one point of view requires greater illumination.”

Got that? According to the Bogus View, sometimes "full and robust public debate" is best served by suppressing the dissenting view. I've previously discussed another of Professor Bogus' . . . interesting ideas here.

Perhaps it's time to promote Professor Bogus to Big Brother Bogus.

Nicki apparently read the same article.

UPDATE: Look who stopped by! Pity they didn't stick around for some "full and robust public debate," eh?


UPDATE II: And look who else!