The Dove World Outreach Center has already blurred the lines between a church and a for-profit enterprise and the lines between a place of "outreach" and a place that calls for exclusion.
It is now blurring the line between protected free speech and a classroom disruption.
Students have been sent home from area public schools for bearing shirts with the center's "Islam is of the Devil" slogan. The slogan caused controversy in July when it appeared on a sign outside the church.
The Dove World Outreach Center has been involved in shady business from the get-go with former members of its academy now coming forward to say that they were put to work for the church's pastor, who used their unpaid labor for his own profit. After being rebuked for their sign and embarrassed by the investigation into their business practices, it seems the members of the Dove World Outreach Center are really pulling for straws, like a painfully unremarkable middle child pining for attention.
The controlling members of the church are technically adults, but that hasn't stopped them from behaving like children.
Using their own offspring to shove hateful messages into the faces of others is cowardly. Because those bearing the message are blameless (or just clearly brainwashed) minors, the propagators of this speech are protected from direct confrontation. Technically, the administrations of the schools can't kill the messengers. Likewise, a person incensed by the message can't slug a 12-year-old in the face. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from the consequences of expressing speech, and by outsourcing their message onto some pitiable adolescents (or preadolescents), the members of the Dove World Outreach Center are also outsourcing the consequences of their actions.
We are against squelching any kind of personal expression, but this is a totally different thing from the symbolic speech protected by the Supreme Court in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District.
Black Panther armbands weren't about hate or violence but its antithesis, as they called for an end to the Vietnam War. Those armbands wouldn't offend or distract anyone in a school unless LBJ's children happened to be in the same calculus class as the protesters. All these "Islam is of the Devil" shirts do is promote intolerance and discrimination to a bunch of impressionable children.
The administrations of these schools acted appropriately in asking the students wearing the "Islam is of the Devil" t-shirts to cover up. A public school should be a refuge from religious proclamation and hate speech. If school officials did nothing as students openly condemned other students on the basis of their beliefs, they would be complicit in the hate speech. This, in turn, would be a total affront to the separation of church and state.
If a hateful sign is placed outside of a church, it should remain. If someone feels strongly about it, they can make their own sign. (Hey, that's the definition of free speech.) Bringing that slogan into an educational environment is an entirely different scenario.
Let's hope that a third controversy will put Pastor Terry Jones and his army of hate-mongering man-children to bed.
