The difficult part about free speech is defending it even for people who are morally reprehensible, hateful and disgusting. And the difficult part about church/state separation is not only ensuring that the state doesn't advance religion, but also ensuring that it doesn't inhibit it either.

Case in point: religious, homophobic, anti-gay bigot Benjamin Arthurs wanted to express his religious beliefs in school, and since they derived from an extreme fundamentalist version of Christianity, which is defined only by hating the right things and the right people, this meant distributing leaflets and wearing a t-shirt promoting the hatred of homosexual people. The ninth-grader was suspended by Midway High School principal Gaynor Canady for disregarding a warning not to distribute the gay-hate leaflets during non-instructional time.

(Realistically speaking, there's only one reason that someone singles out one group of people to be the subject of oppositional leaflets. One doesn't obsess about opposing gay people, insisting that there's something wrong and evil about them and that they should be forced to change or go away for the convenience of others, out of love, compassion, tolerance or even just neutrality. A normal Christian needn't fixate on one particular "sin," targeting those supposed "sinners" for opposition while ignoring all the others out of "love." When was the last time you saw a Christian passing out leaflets about adultery, theft, murder, gluttony, touching a woman having her period, wearing cloth of multiple fibers, allowing women to teach or speak, judging others, greed, eating shellfish or pork, cursing your parents, etc? The single-minded fixation on homosexuality to the exclusion of all else can only be explained by hate, regardless of what excuses the person claiming to be a Christian puts forth. It starts with hate, and the religion is merely the justification. Further, the fixation on homosexuality for opposition and the insistence that homosexuals are wrong because they're different (and the idea that they should be forced to be the same) to the exclusion of all other traits that make people different without similar demands of sameness, also indicates an anti-gay bias, stemming from simple hate.)

The problem is that the same reasoning in Tinker vs Des Moines that protects students' rights to protest quietly also protects the rights of students to express their viewpoints, no matter how revolting and denigrating. They have the right to be horrible, hateful and spiteful just as long as they do so peacefully and without disrupting the educational process themselves.

The most amusing response to anti-gay bigots handing out their hate flyers would be for other students to express equally ridiculous viewpoints in the same fashion. For example, students could wear shirts expressing the primitive abnormality of having red hair and pass out flyers detailing the evil and hardship associated with being left-handed. Or, to be even more directly confrontational (for the feeble minded who don't understand sarcasm), one could wear t-shirts of shocking bible verses and hand out leaflets detailing the violence, oppression, destruction and pain caused by Christianity over the ages and in modern times.

Surely if they can dish it out, they can take it, right?

---Nick

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