UM draws fire for requiring reading of play on gay man

Baltimore Sun ^ | August 23, 2002 | Alec MacGillis

[dmz]

The University of North Carolina and University of Maryland might have picked different books for their campuswide reading programs, but they are running into similar opposition - including the threat of court challenges. Maryland's flagship public university has ordered 10,000 copies of The Laramie Project, a play about the killing of gay college student Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyo., in 1998, to distribute next week to all freshmen and all other students living on the College Park campus.

The play will be required reading in many seminars and will also be the subject of college orientation meetings in residence halls, college officials say. Other students will be encouraged, but not required, to read it, they said.

Yesterday, the lead counsel in a widely publicized lawsuit against the University of North Carolina's selection of a book about the Quran for its freshman reading program said he was considering court action against Maryland as well.

"The bringing of The Laramie Project to campus sounds for all the world as if the university is attempting to impose an orthodoxy of belief in favor of homosexuality, coercing students to accept one particular side of a hotly contested political and, indeed, religious subject," said Stephen M. Crampton, chief counsel for the American Family Association, based in Tupelo, Miss.

[dmz]

I did a few searches for this but did not see it, so I thought I would post this, my first on FR.

[EdReform]

A before-coffee bump & ping

Good article - thanks for posting!

(Back later...)

[GrandMoM]

....HOMOSEXUALITY; USA method of population control!!

[Travis McGee]

Freepers in MD should print up a few thousand extracts from David Horowitz' "Front Page" articles on the difference in media treatment of the Matthew Shepherd and Jesse Dirkheising cases, and pass them out to freshmen at the UM.

[EdReform]

Bump