If you thought that something as innocuous as putting up 3,000 American flags on school grounds to pay tribute to those murdered on September 11 couldn’t be controversial, you haven’t been to Marietta College.
Administrators at this liberal arts college in southeast Ohio are threatening to cancel a 9/11 memorial planned by their students if flags from other countries are not observed in the activities as well
“I was taken aback by this decision,” said Sarah Snow, an Alabama native and junior at Marietta. “Our school should help students put on events, not set up obstacles, especially when we’re trying to honor those fallen.”
It all started when Snow, the president of the Marietta College Republicans, approached her Student Life department to get approval to participate in the 9/11 Never Forget Project. In addition to organizing a candlelight vigil, Snow sought to plant 3,000 American flags around campus starting this Sunday morning. She received approval from the Office of Student Life on June 23, more than two months ago. But when she returned to campus for the fall semester, days before the memorial was to begin, the vice president of Student Life, Robert Pastoor, vowed to terminate the tribute unless foreign flags were mixed together with American ones.
“He [Robert Pastoor] insisted we add the international flags for the reason that it was a ‘global perspective’ school,” Snow told HUMAN EVENTS in explaining Pastoor’s basis for interfering with the College Republicans’ memorial. He continued, she noted, by saying, “Other nationalities were killed in the twin towers as well” and that Marietta must “consider how the Muslim and Chinese students will feel about the [American flag] display.”
Read More...
