Our View - Wednesday

Shushing Christians

Of hypocrites and academic freedom

The latest battle in an ongoing war on academic freedom involves three speakers who will address cadets at the Air Force Academy today. The speakers have one trait that’s common to most who would be censored from the hallowed halls of modern academe: They are Christians.

The speakers — Walid Shoebat, Kamal Saleem and Zak Anani — will speak as part of the academy’s annual political forum. All profess to be “former terrorists” who’ve converted from Islam to Christianity. Their message annoys wannabe censors.

Assaults on academic freedom result from weak minds, sinister intent, and a combination of the two. Clearly our Founders, when they established a country for the free, wanted ideas to thrive. They gave us the First Amendment so all could exercise religion freely, without government interfering or establishing one religion as more important than another. They wanted religious philosophies to freely compete in the marketplace of intellect and discourse.

The feeble-minded interpret that portion of the First Amendment as a law that protects government and individuals from the annoyance of religion — particularly Christianity. Organizations such as the ACLU and the Freedom From Religion Foundation work to scour mainstream religious expression from public space, pretending the Constitution protects us from religious content. They twist the law into something opposite of its intent. Everything in the Constitution is designed to limit the powers of government, in order to enhance the freedoms of individuals to maximize creativity, productivity, imagination and interpersonal association. Nothing in the Constitution gives the state authority to censor unpopular, controversial expression.

Increasingly, however, Christians are told that the First Amendment should silence them. Routinely, a Christian person or organization, in Somewhere, U.S.A., winds up in the news fighting for the right to express reverence for God. When a politician speaks of God, we’re told religion doesn’t belong in politics. If that’s the case, a rabbi or minister elected to Congress should suspend all religious considerations from decisions or rhetoric — a preposterous and impossible notion. All law is rooted in morality, and most morality can be traced to religion.

Private citizens are told they can express their religious beliefs only in churches or the privacy of their homes. Look no further than Lewis-Palmer High School, just north of the academy, for a recent example. When valedictorian Erica Corder spoke of Jesus in her 2006 graduation speech, school officials reacted as if she had mooned the audience. They refused to give Corder her diploma until she apologized for straying from a pre-approved speech, which didn’t use the J-word.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports that Michael Broadley, of Coon Rapids, Minn., was told in 2007 that he couldn’t give away gospel CDs at Mount Rushmore without a permit — a permit Broadley said the National Park Service refused to give him because of the content of the CDs. A second-grader in New Jersey’s Frenchtown School District was forbidden to sing “Awesome God” at a talent show. Amber Johnson-Loehner, a 13-year-old from Tampa, Fla., testified to Congress in the ’90s that she was forbidden to pass out gospel recordings to her classmates on Halloween, during a party in which students were expected to exchange treats.

Year after year, far left, anti-American, anti-Christian speakers — even people who blame the American government for plotting the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — speak at state universities. They’ve rolled out the red carpet for Ward Churchill, the former University of Colorado professor who advocated terrorism and compared Twin Tower victims to Nazis. The pubic is told that enlightened minds result from academic freedom, in which even the most outrageous ideas should be presented on campus and paid for with public funds.

Yet critics of the Air Force Academy speech are worked up because the three speakers might proselytize their newfound love for Jesus. David Antoon, an academy graduate who accuses his alma mater of promoting Christianity, criticized the speech without having heard it.

“What’s troublesome to me is this is pure ideology and it has nothing to do with academics,” said Antoon, who likened the academy to a Bible college in an interview with The Gazette.

Antoon wants us to believe that a speech by former religious terrorists — during a war on terror that’s enmeshed with religion — has no academic value at a military academy. Really? How can that be?

It remains open to debate whether the academy promotes Christianity, which it should not. Hosting Christian speakers who espouse their faith, however, is a far cry from the promotion of religion. It’s the academy facilitating free speech and discourse — the building blocks of enlightenment. Anyone is free to reject or embrace whatever the speakers say. If hosting them amounts to promoting Christianity, then hosting Cat Stevens promotes Islam. If speakers at public institutions can’t espouse religious beliefs, then the state is promoting secularism as the only appropriate belief. Anyone with a religious worldview, in that case, doesn’t have free speech. At least, not on campus.

The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations seems to understand this.

“The First Amendment protects even bigoted speech, but those who value mutual understanding should have an equal right to speak out and be heard,” the council said in a press release Tuesday.

The council didn’t ask the academy to silence the speakers. Instead, it asked that speakers with opposing views about Islam be invited to speak. It’s a reasonable request, made in the interest of bringing more information to the academy’s free market of rhetoric and ideas. Bring on the Muslims.