House Editorial: Casting the first stone back
JMU students should know better than to give our perennial guest the audience he desires
Posted on January 18, 2007

Our campus was graced, on Tuesday and Wednesday, by one of our most hated reruns: the infamous campus preacher. A Florida native, this rhetorical gift to our campus makes recurring appearances on the commons at least once a year, alerting us to our sinful, evil ways and imploring us to renounce the sins of the flesh to be — literally — perfect like him.

It is not our interest to discuss theology, though it would be easy to make a case against his. For example, one of his contentions yesterday was that the first miracle of Christ was to turn water into nonalcoholic grape juice, not wine as us “drunken, fornicating, masturbating” college students (and a seemingly unanimous amalgamation of Bible translators) were led to believe.

More pressing to us at The Breeze was the response of the student body to his outlandish claims. There was screaming, cursing, slander and all manners of vulgarity, which the preacher quickly labeled our “potty mouths.” WXJM, there to promote an event, used their sound privileges to blast metal music in an attempt to drown out the preacher. Mob mentality notwithstanding, we make a very poor case for ourselves as a whole when we respond to extremists in kind.

The preacher, with his well-worn Bible, inflammatory sign and outlandish verbal condemnations, knows how to do his job well. According to one of his associates, a home-schooled teenager from nearby Elkton, he has been in the business full time for the last nine years. The more people he gets riled up, the more extreme and even potentially violent responses he gets from the crowd, the more he will expose the masses to his message. If we in the crowd had dissipated, his “job” would dissipate as well.

Contrary to popular opinion, however, he does have a right to be here. Our university has, in wisdom and foresight, created spaces like the commons for individuals to gather and for ideas to be disseminated. Some schools are not so lucky. And based upon common law, when public institutions open up a public forum, it must be a forum of equal access. If JMU were to deny the preacher the right to use the commons in the same manner as it permits other institutions, it would be content-based discrimination, a prior restraint and an infringement of his First Amendment rights.

The preacher has just as much a right to speak on the commons as do any of us. But more importantly, he has just as much a right to communicate his ideas we do to turn around and walk away.