A student has filed a lawsuit against Florida State University after he was punished for sharing his religious beliefs with another student.
The case was brought by Jack Denton against the university and student government officials. Defendants include the president, John Thrasher, student affairs official Amy Hecht and members of the student government including Ahmad Daraldik and Alexander Harmon.
The case, filed in U.s. District Court in Tallahassee, Florida, is being handled by the Alliance Defending Freedom.
“In a June 3 private text conversation with fellow Catholic students, Jack Denton suggested that BlackLivesMatter.com, Reclaim the Block, and the ACLU advocate for causes opposed to Catholic teaching and Catholic students may wish to avoid supporting the organizations financially,” ADF explained. “After another student took screenshots of Denton’s private messages and shared them publicly on social media, student senators mocked and misrepresented his remarks and, after a failed attempt on June 3, removed Denton from leadership as the SGA’s student senate president on June 5.”
But those actions, the case contends, were in violation of the First Amendment, and neither the university nor student government officials addressed the problem.
A lawyer on the case, Tyson Langhofer, said: “All students should be able to peacefully share their personal convictions without fear of retaliation. Florida State should be fostering real diversity of thought, not punishing individuals based on their religious convictions or political beliefs. While FSU students claim they’re creating a ‘safe space,’ they’ve tried to cancel Jack’s freedoms and discriminate against him because they don’t like his beliefs, in direct violation of the school’s SGA Ethics Code, the Student Body Constitution, and—most importantly—the First Amendment.”
The lawsuit states: “Student governments at public universities are the ultimate ground for experimenting with representative self-government in a diverse society. Students from all walks of life and points of view have the opportunity to work together for the common good of their university community through the political process, all while engaging in the pursuit of truth that the university is designed to facilitate. Students must live with one another—quite literally—and student government helps them learn to do so in a way that respects the ability to develop different moral and political ideas and speak about them in a political context.
“Just as public universities cannot fulfill their academic mission by adopting an orthodoxy and stifling all nonconformist thought, so too student governments at universities cannot achieve their pedagogical purpose of political simulation when they discard constitutional norms. And, like a public university, student governments have constitutional obligations by virtue of their authority delegated from the state.”
The filing said Denton, a devout Catholic, was simply expressing basic Catholic teachings to other Catholic students privately.
But because others took offense, “student outrage was fomented, and the Student Senate implemented an ad hoc religious test for office; no one with Mr. Denton’s beliefs can hold a leadership position in our Student Senate (even if they only talk about those beliefs in private).”
Student Senate members then prevented him from appealing to the student government’s court, and university officials failed to intervene.
“To vindicate his constitutional rights, Mr. Denton asks this court to order his reinstatement, compensation, and the expungement of all records relating to the Senate’s retaliatory and discriminatory actions against him.”
The complaint points out that Denton accurately noted that some of the organizations, such as the ACLU, promote abortion, which violates Catholic beliefs.
“If I stay silent while my brothers and sisters may be supporting an organization that promotes grave evils, I have sinned through my silence,” he said.
Denton’s detractors later twisted his words and accused him of calling people “grave evils,” the filing explains.
