"University Affirms It’s In Favor of the Rest of the Constitution, Too"

"University Spokesperson Martin Mbugua assured the media that the faculty would be getting around to writing long resolutions voicing support for other basic human freedoms “really soon” and that they released the one regarding the First Amendment early because they were “psyched to release it.”

“We apologize if anyone took this to mean that we were preemptively silencing student dissent,” Mbugua said. “We weren’t trying to import a debate from the University of Chicago, and we totally weren’t trying to send a message to students that, should a controversy over a campus speaker emerge, they would not be listened to.”"

http://www.tigermag.com/2015/04/university-affirms-its-in-favor-of-the-rest-of-the-constitution-too/

Clearly I am not the only one who is tired of people wrapping themselves in the first amendment to avoid dealing with how problematic they are being - do these same people get mad when they are asked to be quiet in libraries? Asked to stop talking during a movie? Where is the line where we have to respect the feelings and comfort of the people who are hearing us? 

I get that the first amendment has prevented important opinions and viewpoints from bring silenced. This is obviously important, but it seems to me to really be about preventing an oppressive State entity from silencing an opposing opinions and political movements. How has it become so widely applied to situations in which a minority-identity-aligned voice is standing against offensive majority-aligned speech? And why, WHY, do people think that they need to protect the capacity for people with minority-identities to be exposed to majority-speech? Is it not understood that this is a reaction to over-exposure?

And I understand that people can feel unfairly silenced when they are just speaking their truths, and that it can feel unfair to be unable to speak those things just because some other people feel offended for reasons you don't understand or don't feel are valid. I understand that it can feel like a violation of freedom of thought. But this first amendment seems like a churlish way to avoid the cognitive demand of listening and shifting perspectives.

(also, stepping off my soapbox, decision-making based on cognitive demand is super fascinating - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2970648/)