Texas Tech's Speech Zones Ruled Out of Bounds
by Jim Brown
October 8, 2004
(AgapePress) - A federal court has ordered Texas Tech University to end a policy that designated a 20-foot wide gazebo as the sole free-speech area on campus. Last week a district court judge struck down a "speech zone" at Texas Tech that limited the ability of students to hand out flyers and hold protest rallies. The judge's ruling also nullified a speech code that barred students from engaging in insulting speech.
Attorney Jordan Lorence is with the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a group that sued Texas Tech on behalf of student Jason Roberts. Lorence says the speech code violated the First Amendment rights of Christian students.
Under the school's policy on campus speech, Lorence points out, saying something as innocuous as "You need Jesus as your savior" could be viewed as insulting to someone and would therefore be punishable. "This had a huge, intimidating and chilling effect on people's ability to speak," he says.
The attorney says the speech code at Tech and similar ones on other college campuses need to be eliminated. "Few of them have been challenged," he says, "and I think that they are grossly unconstitutional."
What ADF is hoping, Lorence adds, is "that the accumulation of these lawsuits and court wins will convince a majority -- or all -- of the state university officials to change them." At the same time, he says he hopes these officials will come to understand that "they are not exempt from what the First Amendment says."
Lorence contends Texas Tech is just one of many public universities engaging in what he calls a "disconcerting pattern of the worst abuses of religious liberty and freedom of speech. " He says this case is just one in a series of lawsuits ADF is filing against state universities that would like to be enclaves of liberal authoritarianism, exempt from the First Amendment.
