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The change in opinion on campus followed a series of administrative emails and emergency faculty meetings, all of which echoed the same story: “These people are lawyers who deliberately provoke people in order to sue them. We need to keep our students away from them. Besides, their ideas are so far from the mainstream that they are best ignored.” Yet their primary message is that homosexuality is evil, which is not only a mainstream idea, but one that has inspired a national dialog in the wake of several well-publicized suicides by gay youth.
My colleagues mostly bought the argument that Phelp’s cult funds itself through lawsuits. While this is a popularly held belief, there is little evidence to support it. The truth is that nearly every one of Phelp’s eleven children is a successful lawyer. They all donate heavily to his church. There have also been several successful lawsuits against his organization, and only a few in his favor, which would make it a very insecure funding source.
Staff also bought into the stereotype that teenagers are impulsive and irresponsible and would likely get themselves into trouble if allowed to exercise their free speech rights. While there are certainly some students at our school who would be inclined to assault the bigots, they had been well trained over the preceding week to not engage with them. More significantly, the actual protest was three blocks from campus. The police had set up barricades separating the protesters from the counter protesters and were not allowing anyone from either group to get near each other. The actual risk to the students in front of campus was negligible.
We had a wonderful opportunity to teach students about free speech, free assembly, solidarity and protest. It was a chance to discuss how free speech means that even crazy ideas get to be expressed, notions like government death panels or teachers unions are destroying public education, but when such ideas are unopposed, eventually people believe them. Instead, we reinforced the ideas that teenagers are fragile, untrustworthy and must be sheltered from all risk.
It seems to me that liability paranoia got in the way of a wonderful teaching moment here!
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