At a meeting on Monday, the Associated Students (AS) at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), denied funding to an event promoting traditional marriage, providing full or partial funding to the other 18 campus events that were requested by student organizations.
The meeting discussed the amounts funded to each campus group. The amounts of funding allocated at the meeting were as follows, as reported by UCSB’s campus newspaper: $12,559 to the Student Initiated Outreach Program, $11,357 to the culture weeks and graduation fund, $20,480 for campus sports teams, $6,152 for academic teams, and $5,565 in unallocated funds. The AS fully granted nine funding requests, partially granted six, granted tabling for three, and fully denied one request.
The Anscombe Society at UCSB, a campus organization that promotes traditional marriage and family life, was denied $1,300 to hire pro-traditional marriage public speaker Ryan T. Anderson to debate UCSB philosophy professor Quentin Gee on the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage.
Carlos Flores, a fourth-year philosophy major and the president of the Anscombe Society at UCSB, said he requested funds for the event twice from the student government. At the first AS funding meeting, only $350 out of the $2,450 he requested was granted. After he responded to the AS with a second funding request and an accusation that they had rejected his initial request because he is conservative, they did not deny the accusation but maintained their denial of his request.
The following comment to the Anscombe Society’s Facebook event, reflecting negative political biases surrounding traditional marriage from campus LGBTQ groups, was captured via screenshot before it was taken down:
Flores said he reached out to the Leadership Institute (LI), a nonprofit dedicated to the advancement of conservative millennials, to help sponsor his event. He was later told by the AS that he was denied funding because his event didn’t seem to be “balanced.” After Flores publicized the AS’s discrimination of his organization via social media, he received an email from AS off-campus student senator Jerel Constantino, in which he was invited for another AS Senate meeting to re-review the event budget.
Constantino expressed interest in finding out about Flores’s “other funding source,” presumably skeptical about the conservative LI’s involvement in allowing the event to still happen.
“You had mentioned in the previous week’s meetings that your group has a grant pending to help cover the cost of your event,” Constantino wrote. “We did not receive any updates regarding this other funding source.”
” … the AS board—which is solely composed of left-leaning students—disapproves of Dr. Ryan T. Anderson’s views on the matter of marriage.”
Carlos Flores, the president of the Anscombe Society at UCSB, slamming the non-funding of a traditional marriage panel
Many of the other events that the AS had agreed to fund were overwhelmingly biased and left-leaning. For instance, the AS agreed to fund the Olive Tree Initiative’s request to plan a trip to New York and Israel. Olive Tree supports Palestinian advocacy in Israel.
“Looking through the recent events they have approved—$8,370 for a feminist organization, a whopping $19,824 total for two LGBT organizations, La Familia de Colores and the Queer Student Union—should convince an impartial observer that the Anscombe event is not being funded because the AS board—which is solely composed of left-leaning students—disapproves of Dr. Ryan T. Anderson’s views on the matter of marriage,” Flores wrote to The Daily Wire. “It is embarrassing to see AS behave in such a petulant and partisan manner.”