Editor’s note: The following letter references an article written by Managing Editor Hannah Pollock titled “Religious demonstrators tell students to ‘confess their sins,’” which was published online at theslateonline.com Oct. 24 and in print Oct. 29.
Dear Editor:
As a 1979 Shippensburg Journalism graduate, I read your recent story headlined, “Religious demonstrators’ tell students to ‘confess their sins.”
As expected, the story contained wild misconceptions, false statements, and strong anti-Christian bias. Hypocritical, double-standard colleges and universities love to babble words like, “inclusion,” “diversity”, “no hate,”, “judgement free”, “tolerance”, “social justice,” etc. However, when an individual or individuals with differing opinions from campus’ rigid left winged orthodoxy enter the college, our two faced liberal administrators, liberal professors and liberal school newspapers scream bloody murder.
All one needs to do is read this front page story to understand this perfectly. In fact, the three men holding signs were never once addressed by their correct title which is “Christian evangelists.” Instead eight times they were falsely given the derogatory label of “protestors” or demonstrators”.
Exactly whom or what were these men “protesting”? There were no events on campus to “protest” that day. The real “protestors” or “demonstrators” were actually the college students.
These students were given ample front page space to heap disdain upon these men and quickly jump onboard the “negativity train”. One student accused the men of “trying to get a rise out of the students”, while another student accused the men of “not preaching the whole gospel.”
However, not one single student was interviewed whom actually approved of the three men. This was amazing. I thought Shippensburg loved “inclusion”, “tolerance”, and “diversity”. Apparently they do not.
The paper also failed to give a detailed interview of the three men themselves. If that interview were indeed conducted, perhaps we could learn that these evangelists’ were compassionate, well-informed citizens whom possessed a “timeless message” applicable to everyone. Of course, that is certainly not the direction that Shippensburg University or The Slate was ever prepared to travel.
David Delp (‘79)
Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania
ddelpa@yahoo.com
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