Is it a free speech issue or a right not to be proselytized against your will issue?
Is there a difference?
Not really; it’s more that the two are in tension. People have a right to proselytize, but they also have a right to refuse to be proselytized. What do you do when the two clash?
Or, more pertinently, maybe you think people don’t have a right to refuse to be proselytized. But I mean actively proselytized as opposed to passively. No, people don’t have a right to obliterate all sources of proselytization, but yes, they have a right to tell other people to stop pestering them.
The Nova Scotia student who was suspended for wearing a T shirt saying “Life is wasted without Jesus” after he’d been told not to, was doing more than just wearing a T shirt.
Students said William Swinimer has been preaching and making them feel uncomfortable, and the shirt was the last straw so they complained.
“He’s told kids they’ll burn in hell if they don’t confess themselves to Jesus,” student Riley Gibb-Smith said.
Katelyn Hiltz, student council vice-president, agreed the controversy didn’t begin with the T-shirt.
“It started with him preaching his religion to kids and then telling them to go to hell. A lot of kids don’t want to deal with this anymore,” she said.
And they shouldn’t have to. They’re a captive audience. They have to be in school. Having to be in school shouldn’t mean having to be harangued by a religious zealot. That would apply to an atheist zealot too, by the way (but atheists are so much less likely to do that kind of thing, and threats of hell are right out).