It’s the woke version of “Get off my lawn!”
In a move not far removed from kicking puppies and mocking the handicapped, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, in Washington, D.C., expelled a dozen Catholic high-school students from its premises for what’s apparently now a sin in our capital: wearing beanies bearing a pro-life message.
Meanwhile, having homosexual “pride” marches and Drag Queen Storytime in D.C. is encouraged.
Fox News reports on the story:
On January 20, students and chaperones from Our Lady of the Rosary School based out of Greenville, South Carolina, traveled to Washington, D.C., for the annual National March for Life. The group members were all wearing matching blue beanies with the words “Rosary PRO-LIFE.”
The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), representing the parents of some of the students involved, alleged that the museum staff mocked the students, hurled expletives and claimed the museum was a “neutral zone” where political or religious messages were not allowed.
On Twitter, the mother of one of the students said the group was approached by a security guard who told them to either take off their beanies or leave the premises. Her daughter allegedly told the guard they were wearing the hats to identify and find one another in the crowd before they were escorted out of the museum.
Other people in the museum were wearing all sorts of different hats as they traversed the exhibits, according to ACLJ Executive Director Jordan Sekulow.
Being a federal entity receiving more than $1 billion of our tax money annually, the Smithsonian Institution is not allowed to censor speech protected by the First Amendment, Sekulow pointed out.
Relevant tweets from the aforementioned mother are below.
The “neutral zone” business is a good one. It sounds like Star Trek and its buffer between Earthlings (and others) and the Klingon Empire. The analogy is appropriate, too, as D.C. seems ever more alien.
Some January 6 political prisoners learned this the hard way when their act of trespassing was cast as an “insurrection” and they were cast into a D.C. gulag. Then there’s the following:
“This is not the first time that Catholic pro-life youngsters have experienced discrimination during a National March for Life [in D.C.],” LifeSite reminds us. “The most celebrated case of recent years concerned students from Covington Catholic High School, most notably the then-16-year-old Nick Sandmann, in 2019. Sandmann was libelled and vilified by mainstream media. The teenager sued, and such press giants as the Washington Post and CNN settled with him out of court.”
As for the Smithsonian, it did repudiate its personnel’s actions. “Asking visitors to remove hats and clothing is not in keeping with our policy or protocols,” said Alison Wood, the museum’s deputy director of communications, to Fox News. “We provided immediate training to prevent a re-occurrence of this kind of incident, and have determined steps to ensure this does not happen again” (relevant tweet below).
Nonetheless, “‘There’s going to be litigation in this one,’ ACLJ said in a broadcast on their station,” LifeSite informs. “‘We’re preparing that and we are proud to be doing it. We are standing up for life whether it is at the Supreme Court of the United States or now, at a district court in Washinton [sic] DC.’”
Unfortunately, this is likely necessary. Only hitting the Smithsonian where it hurts, in the pocketbook, will minimize the chances that First Amendment rights will be trampled in the future.
Yet there’s another issue here: This incident reflects our time’s growing lack of virtue and, associated with this, leftist intolerance. After all, how did the Smithsonian staff members get it into their heads to take an action contrary to institution policy? Did they really think it was policy, as they claimed, even though museum visitors with other political/social messages on clothing were continually present? Perhaps, since people tend to most notice what offends them, it was only the pro-life messages that caught their eyes. Yet that the workers reportedly mocked the students casts doubt on this theory.
At best, staff members were sorely lacking in civics training; this itself reflects a lack of the virtue of Diligence, either on their part, that of their teachers and other adults when they were raised, or both. At worst, and quite likely, their actions bespeak of a lack of a sense of duty and what can explain it: operation by preference and not principle. And what at least partially explains this is our time’s prevailing moral relativism/nihilism, today’s rejection of Truth (objective by definition), which leads to people often making decisions based not on Truth but on the most compelling yardstick they have left for doing so: emotion.
Thus, noting Ben Franklin’s warning that passion “governs, but she never governs wisely,” we ought to consider that those increasingly governing our lives, leftists, are led by nothing but passion.
