A Canadian high school student was suspended for a week because wore a t-shirt promoting his Christian beliefs and he was told if he wears it again – he could be suspended for the remainder of the school year.Let's ignore for a moment that this occurred in Canada. Is the language really "hate speech" of the type that should be banned?
William Swinimer, a student at Forest Heights Community School in Nova Scotia, was punished for wearing a shirt that read, “Life is wasted without Jesus.” The shirt is a reference to a passage of Scripture from the New Testament.
Swinimer told Fox News that he was told the shirt was a form of “hate talk.”
“I’ve been told by my principal that it is hate talk and is disrespectful to other people’s religions,” Swinimer said. “She said it (the shirt) cannot be in school because people would get offended.”
Nancy Pynch-Worthylake, the school board superintendent, told The Canadian Press that the wording on the shirt is “problematic.”
“If I have an expression that says, ‘My life is enhanced with Jesus,’ then there’s no issue with that, everybody is able to quickly understand that that’s my opinion about my own belief,” she told the newspaper. “If the shirt were to say, ‘Without Jesus, your life is a complete waste,’ then that’s clear that it is an opinion aimed at somebody else’s belief.” link
You think they'd ban a similar shirt mentioning Allah instead of Jesus? I don't.
3 comments:
Better yet -- what if an atheist kid showed up wearing a shirt with the Nietzsche quote "God is dead"? Would the student have been directed to change close because he was denigrating the religious beliefs of students?
I think it's kind of a rude thing to put on a shirt, but so are lots of things. Not worth making a fuss over, no--but then, I haven't had nosy people tell me I'm going to hell 6 times a year for my whole life, and if if I had I might have a shorter temper.
(Since I'm LDS, lots of people do in fact think I'm going to hell, but few of them have been rude enough to say so to my face. :) )
Demonstration proof of the importance of the First Amendment - on the flimsiest of pretexts and possessing a pathetically tiny amount of power the infringement of free expression proceeds with enthusiasm. The notion that it wouldn't be carried to the larger stage at the smallest opportunity is proven false.
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