PENN LAW CLS DEFENDS CRITIC

The Torch shares the following story:

Last Friday, March 25 (which was Good Friday for most Christians), a tempest erupted at the University of Pennsylvania Law School here in Philadelphia. It seems that the Christian Legal Society (CLS) at Penn Law has a tradition of hiding plastic Easter eggs around the school on Good Friday for students to pick up. These eggs contain candy and a printed Bible verse, and the Bible verse can be taken to a CLS table and redeemed for more candy. Apparently this event has taken place without incident for a number of years.

Not this year. This year, CLS members arriving at the law school to hide their eggs on the morning of Good Friday discovered that someone else had beat them to it. Upon opening the eggs, they found not candy but cartoons of Jesus saying things that many Christians would find offensive. For instance, one features Jesus referring to God as "just a stupid old asshole," while another depicts Jesus as questioning his sexuality. This may not exactly constitute engaging in a constructive dialogue, but that's not required--it's well within the bounds of free speech.

So I'm sure you can guess the rest of the story: the offended group of students went to the administration, demanding that the culprit be found and disciplined for the "hate crime" of pushing beliefs that the group finds offensive. FIRE has seen this kind of thing time and time again--and we're always on the side of defending the rights of the "culprit."

But this time, something very different happened: Penn Law's CLS didn't ask for censorship at all! Instead, it publicly defended the right of its opponent (who turned out to be fellow Penn Law student George Black) to speak and invited FIRE's David French to come to the law school on Wednesday and give a talk abut the issues raised by the incident.

Click here to read the rest of the post.

h/t: Red State Lawblog. I didn't think to post about this until Prof. Duncan did.