The evangelist preacher that showed up last week to scream his word of god to the campus community shocked and surprised, angered and perplexed many members of said community. It prompted many to ask the question: Just what the hell gives him the right to even be here? The answer is plenty. The most obvious right is the right to free speech that’s guaranteed by our constitution. Anyone can say just about anything and indeed do just about anything (even things that would otherwise be against the law) and it is protected by the right to free speech. A person can urinate in public if he can come up with a convincing enough case for it being a political statement of some kind. Flag-burning is also sanctioned by the US Supreme Court. So what’s wrong with preaching religion? Insofar as I can tell, the man did not spew hat as purported by those who mounted the counter-protest. Their signs were made for the Phelps event last year and has little to no bearing to what happened here at UMB. It seems to be a scheme by some students to gain attention for themselves and nothing more. Being a preacher may seem offensive to some, but it’s also pretty offensive to use his actions as a pretext for you agenda. A second possible objection to the preacher’s right to speechify would be that this a campus for students to go to school, not some sort of open forum for nut jobs to corrupt young minds. That would be a good argument except that this is a public, state supported campus. So like any other state funded/ owned property it is open to the public at large. Provided the non student visitor does not break any laws or pose some reasonable threat to students they can be here as long as they like. This includes screaming men with bibles. So what of separation of church and state then? Simple, it does not apply. Separation of church and state refers to the government not being able to tell you what religion to practice or how to practice it. It also prevents the government form creating a National religion or actively trying to perpetuate one religion or destroy one. It has nothing to do with preventing religious zealots from peddling their wares in state parks/playgrounds/or universities. So what’s to stop say some skinhead from wandering onto the plaza and start preaching? If everyone has the right to free speech, as well as the right make that speech wherever public property is owned, how do we keep every Looney tune with a megaphone from derailing campus life? The answer is discretion, and the main criteria for the level of discretion should be “does the person speaking pose a significant threat to the health and safety of the UMB community.” I would say that this is the question Campus Police must have asked themselves while they were on scene. I would bet you they keep on asking themselves this question right up until the protest started and the answer became yes. I’ll offer up the skinhead as another counter example, I know it’s easy to pick on them but it illustrates my point. If a KKK member started shouting about the purity and dominance of the Aryan race it would probably take one to five minutes for him to get his ass-kicked. So obviously he poses an immediate threat to the well being of the community. With the police on standby the Preacher was able to engage the students without enraging them to the point where someone was going to get hurt. So using their best desecration based on the attitude of the audience the behavior of Keith and taking into consideration the right to free speech and assembly police determined Keith had a right to be here, and I am inclined to agree. The key point here is that political speech – like the preacher’s – is protected by the law. Who is to say that his words were not political, especially when some of the students called him a hater and a homophobic individual? By engaging him, weren’t they turning his action or speech into a political issue? I think so. Within this context, I think we can say that even though UMB’s a public university, his speech is protected. The most one can fault him for is a lack of bureaucratic permits to speak his mind. In conclusion, UMB has always as far as I know prided itself on being a diverse and open-minded campus. That sentiment doesn’t really jive with protesting another man’s right to speak because you don’t like what he is saying. Opposing viewpoints should be welcomed and debated in a civilized fashion, and if you really don’t like what’s being said we’ll you can always do what they did in Lowell, ignore him till he goes away.
If anyone listened to the Evangelist preacher that came to UMB two weeks ago to preach the “good word of the Lord,” it would not take long to realize that he was here to proselytize and not to engage in any sort of meaningful theological debate of any sort. Hence, it’s not a legal act of free speech as there are laws and legal precedence for the separation of church and state that remain on the books in the US and MA. Religious freedom may be another principle of our nation, but it’s not a license to preach, especially when it’s on the grounds of a public university. After all this principle is written in the First Amendment of our Bill Rights, which stated: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .” It was also a notion supported by our Founding Fathers, principally Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists to assure them that the 1st Amendment protected religious institutions from interference from government via the compounded effect of the Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause provided the underlie the amendment. The “wall of separation” – a term coined by Roger Williams of Rhode Island – was also reinforced by the modern day US Supreme Court in the case of Everson v. Board of Education (1947), which concluded that: “The ‘establishment of religion’ clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws [that] aid one religion, aid all religions or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will…Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups and vice versa. In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect ‘a wall of separation between Church and State.” It was expanded to notions of religion in the curriculum in the recent and well-publicized case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005) – which held that creationism cannot be taught in any form in a public school regardless of what name it appears under due to the fact that it’s a religious idea. Based on the legal precedence established by these two cases, it shouldn’t take a stretch of the imagination and the law to say that proselytizing on campus is a violation of the separation of church and state principle that’s still on the books. If he was a theologian discussing it within the forum of a classroom, then it may be understandable. But this preacher had no official business with the school and didn’t even bother to clear his intentions with the school administrators. In conclusion, the preacher had no right to come on campus to speak about religion regardless of his intentions