Christian witness is Disorderly conduct?

A campus administrator ordered Chike Uzuegbunam to stop what he was doing.

But Chike wasn’t breaking the law. He was simply distributing Gospel literature to any interested fellow students. And he was doing so peacefully.

Apparently that wasn’t acceptable at Georgia Gwinnett College (GGC) in Lawrenceville, Georgia. So, campus administrators restricted Chike to two small speech zones. These zones made up less than 0.0015 percent of campus and were only open 10 percent of the week.

As absurd as the requests were, Chike obeyed these unconstitutional restrictions and reserved one of the speech zones. But as soon as he spoke in it, campus administrators found a new way to silence him. This time, an officer approached Chike and said that he was engaging in “disorderly conduct” under GGC’s speech code.

Chike was silenced again. For peacefully sharing the Gospel message.

This is America. You have the right to speak freely. And that’s especially true for students on public college and university campuses where all ideas should be welcome, not just those that campus officials consider acceptable.

But right now, campus administrators across the United States are limiting speech. Like GGC, they are using speech zones and speech codes to stop speech they don’t like.

That’s what happened to Chike. But he didn’t sit on the sidelines while his rights were violated. Chike drew a line.

With the help of Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys, Chike filed a lawsuit against GGC. Soon after, the school filed a motion to dismiss the case, calling Chike’s speech “fighting words”—a category meant for speech that incites violence.

The Gospel is not “fighting words.” That’s a slanderous claim against all Christians who simply want to speak about their faith. The Gospel is a message of love.

Thankfully, Chike never gave up fighting for his freedom. And today, ADF attorneys will be defending him at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

This kind of thing isn’t supposed to happen in America. From the beginning, the Founders of our nation envisioned a new kind of public square in which the rights of the people to speak freely would be protected by law.

But today, this vision of freedom is in jeopardy.

Across America, many seek to drastically reshape society. And in the process, they want to abolish freedom and silence speech. No amount of compromise will be enough to satisfy them.

Day by day, it is becoming clearer that Christians who speak about their faith will not be tolerated in many places. They will be silenced and punished—even on public college and university campuses—the very places where the free exchange of ideas is supposed to thrive.

But students don’t check their constitutionally protected freedoms once they set foot on campus.

ADF attorneys have a 100% success rate when challenging anti-free speech zones, like the one Chike is facing.

Email from Alliance Defending Freedom -- info@adflegal.org

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