By Marjorie Kirk

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Following complaints about a column by Kentucky Kernel Editor-in-Chief Will Wright, the Student Government Association’s Senate is meeting Wednesday to discuss a resolution on tolerance and acceptance on campus.

SGA Senator Arshia Saiyed decided to sponsor the resolution after other members of SGA and students in her law class discussed the column “Time for an honest discussion on Islam.”

“It is in response to the incident in the Kentucky Kernel (column),” Saiyed said. “Some individuals were unhappy with some of the opinions that were stated, so it came up in SGA and, because SGA does represent the entire student body, (the resolution) was a showing of support of diverse communities.”

Related: Islam column insulting to UK Muslims

The proposed resolution, which is a formalized statement of SGA’s opinion, will be discussed and voted on by the SGA senate, and can be found on the SGA’s website under their Sept. 30 agenda.

SGA Senate President Ben Childress said he hopes the resolution will show students the SGA is aware of what is going on around campus and they are listening to the concerns of students.

“There is a members privilege time at the end (of the senate meeting) where anybody from the public can speak,” Childress said. “I would encourage people if they feel really passionate about something to talk to the senator of their college or one of the at-large senators, because that’s their job to represent students.”

Michael Frazier, president of UK’s Young Americans for Liberty, said the resolution could limit free speech on campus.

“When you put that to a legislative body … to denounce or affirm a private opinion, unintentionally it creates a form of censorship,” Frazier said. “For a legislative body to denounce the opinion of one person in their private capacity … (is) not an expressed form of sanction.”

Frazier, who has been an active representative of SGA’s Diversity and Inclusion Task Force and UK OUTsource, believes there are other methods SGA and students can exercise to bring about inclusion and diversity awareness, without the legislative body becoming involved in a debate on which opinions are condonable.

“It puts a Band-Aid over things instead of going over into the concrete problems,” Frazier said. “SGA could organize through its diversity-including task force … having a discussion, having a forum, having a panel. Doing those sorts of outreaches are within the limits and something SGA should do.”

The meeting will be held 7 p.m. Wednesday in the W. T. Young Library auditorium, and is open to the public. Students will be allowed to voice their opinions before the SGA Senate.