Letters to the editor

I saw the article in the Opinion Section about how the street preachers in the compass are very annoying. I made a petition to stop these preachers. After all, the article ended by saying such people should be banned from preaching here. Below is the petition link.
www.ipetitions.com/petition/vcupreach/index.html

The Petition
We, the undersigned students and other members of the VCU community, request that the VCU authorities and leaders take action to stop the religious preachers from preaching while outdoors on campus. We request that the preachers be disallowed to preach in an area called “the compass” especially. We request that they only be allowed to preach in reserved rooms and religious places.

We have many reasons for requesting this. The first reason is for the safety of the preachers and students who are supposedly listening to them. Some mentally unstable person could disapprove of what the preachers are saying and try to physically harm them. We don’t want to see that happen. If you grant us our requests, then their audiences will consist only of people who approve of, or are interested in, what the preacher has to say.

The second reason is that standing on a stool and screaming at random people walking by because they don’t seem religious enough is, in our opinion, a form of harassment and abuse under VA law according to the VA laws linked to in the second and eleventh bullets of this Web site page:
http://leg1.state.va.us/000/ls…

We encourage you to read those laws because the preachers often say things that offend females, homosexuals, and non-Christians. Not only do we consider it to be harassment, we also find it to be intolerably annoying. As we stated earlier, we support their right to preach and organize in reserved rooms and religious places, and we accept their right to distribute leaflets and Bibles. Screaming the so-called “Word of God” almost every day at unannounced times, however, is where we draw the line. Thank you for your time.

-Nicholas DeFilippis

I have to vehemently disagree with the conclusions that you came to, Eric (“Is religious speech acceptable?”). While I am, like you, an atheist and am quite offended by the people that come onto campus and spout the religious hate speech, they more than constitutionally have their right to free speech. These people aren’t violating time, place, or manner restrictions set upon them, and since the campus police have not restricted or arrested them for “preaching” on university property, they have received permission from the university to say their hateful speech in the compass and other places on campus.

However, the essence of the First Amendment is, as Justice Oliver Holmes said in his dissent of the case of Whitney v. California, “freedom for the thought we hate.” As you said, a university is the perfect forum for a “marketplace of ideas”. If we don’t allow contrary opinions to exist and be heard for consideration in this marketplace, then we create an intellectual homogeneous community that doesn’t evolve, grow and communicate. As Holmes said in another famous dissent, Gitlow v. New York, “If, in the long run, the beliefs expressed… are destined to be accepted by the dominant forces of the community, the only meaning of free speech is that they should be given their chance and have their way.”

If that means the KKK and these people are allowed to express themselves, so be it. Instead of hiding them away, in fear that their speech is harmful and hurtful, let them speak their ignorant and offensive speech. Let the reasoned listener make up their mind. A democracy lives off this type of speech, to allow people to debate and express themselves as they will. Preventing that would reflect more poorly on us than on the speech we intend to censor.

-Christian Wright