For a university in the Bible Belt, LSU isn’t being too nice to its Christians.
Last week, following the Tigers’ valiant defeat of the South Carolina Gamecocks, the University sent out a broadcast email featuring a photograph of four Tiger football fans.
The four fans, Joel D’Aubin, Ben Wallace, AJ Fagan and Cameron Cooke, were pictured Tiger’d to the nines, their chests and faces painted in purple and gold — their countenances fixed with the steely gaze of true disciples of Death Valley.
But it wasn’t LSU’s 23 to 21 win over the Gamecocks that got their picture plastered across the websites of Fox News and the Huffington Post Monday.
It was how the University chose to edit that photograph that has raised the national media’s ire.
You see, the men belong to a group known as the “Painted Posse.”
They convey their Christian allegiance by painting a small purple cross on their shoulders, blending it into their costumes and thus calling you toward their faith on a deep, subliminal level.
Luckily for us, the University vigilantly caught onto the Posse’s scheme and quickly photoshopped the crosses off of their shoulders.
That was certainly a close call — if the University hadn’t drastically overreacted and swiftly made a mockery of their students’ First Amendment rights, someone may have gotten mildly annoyed.
The University has since stated they will no longer use that photo in their emails. What a novel idea: avoiding controversy instead of creating it.
Why not use the unedited picture, though? What’s wrong with showing that some of your students are religious?
I don’t know what’s more offensive, the affront to my Christian friends or the way this whole fiasco was botched.
Firstly, if our University is public, and the First Amendment is supposed to protect our freedom of speech in the public sphere, what’s not adding up here?
Since when has it been illegal, or at least impolitic, to display religious iconography in public? Especially in Louisiana, the fleur-de-lis is a religious symbol and it’s emblazoned across the helmets of the New Orleans Saints — I mean, they’re called the Saints.
And after the money Louisiana taxpayers put up for that stadium, don’t you dare argue the Saints aren’t a state institution.
There are half a dozen churches and chapels on campus, three of them literally in a row by the North Gates.
I thought the whole idea behind separation of church and state was that we were cool with religion as long as no faiths were discriminated against.
You just discriminated, LSU. You just did what you were trying not to do, but on an infinitely larger scale.
In trying to protect people’s delicate sensibilities, you just pissed off the largest body of religious folks on campus.
What were you thinking?
Secondly, the public relations perspective: Radical reverends commonly denounce our state universities as nothing but communist indoctrination factories intent on producing evolution-spouting whores of Babylon.
Public universities have to fight that stigma to maintain a culture of impartiality and openness — not play right into it.
This is the sort of stuff the religious-right’s “War on God” is made of — the University didn’t just give the Pat Robertson types some ammo, it loaded the clip and chambered the round.
For the love of Mike (the Tiger), the University was first founded as a college for training Christian clergy. It wasn’t just the old war skule, it was the old war skule and seminary.
You could have published the photo and batted down any complaints by touting them as “historical,” or you could have published the photo and combated any complaints by actually defending your student body’s right to free expression.
The point is, you should have just published the damn picture – end of story.
