Gawker brings us a great story. There’s this open air preacher named John Chisham — truly an obnoxious character — who runs around college campuses and spring break celebrations and screams at people about how they’re going to hell and whatnot. He particularly hates gay people, but he’s the sort of wingnut who makes a solid attempt to spread his hate around. So some kids at Minnesota State University – Mankato, got tired of his constant presence on their campus and decided to respond in an ingenious way: They protested him back at his own church:
John Chisham (pictured, on the job) is a preacher at the River of Life Alliance Church. He travels around preaching in public on college campuses, which is his right. He sometimes tells women they’re dressed like prostitutes, and he tells students that gay people will burn in hell—though, to be fair, he tells Inside Higher Ed that “he thinks many people are facing eternity in hell, not just gay people.”
Students at Minnesota State University, Mankato were disturbed by Chisham’s preaching on their campus. But instead of shouting him down, or calling for him to be banned, they simply exercised some free speech of their own:
Rather, students followed his most recent visit to the campus by going to the service at which he preaches on Sundays (at a YMCA), where they walked to the front of the room and held up signs with the names and photographs of gay youth who have killed themselves this year after bullying incidents.
Nice!
Chisham, the poor baby, thinks that the students are Big Mean Bullies, apparently not seeing that standing with a megaphone and telling strangers that they’re going to burn in hell is one of the highest forms of bullying behavior imaginable.
Now I am going to be a bully and link you to his blog, which is accessible via a two second Google search, because Google is also a bully.
