Polly Anna Olsen, a student at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, is suing her school after being barred from passing out Christian themed Valentine’s Day cards on the college campus.
Polly, a paralegal student, filed a lawsuit against the college, members of the school board and five faculty members earlier this month. In the lawsuit, she argued that the school had infringed upon her First and Fourth Amendment rights when they prohibited her from passing out her valentines.
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The cards included the following Bible verses:
- John 4:11 “You are special!”
- John 4:11 “God is love”
- Romans 5:8 “Jesus loves you”
- 1 Peter 5:7 “You are loved and cared for!”
On Feb. 14, 2018, Olsen was walking around campus, passing out her cards when a campus security guard, Officer Jesse Hagel, told her she was breaking the school’s policy on “soliciting.”
“Everyone said thank you,” Olsen told The Daily Wire. “The only person that refused [a valentine] was the security guard and that is because he was doing his job.”
Olsen explained that when she asked the security officer why she couldn’t distribute the cards, he told her “the content may be found to be offensive.”
Later, Olsen had a meeting with the school’s director of diversity, who informed her that the policy stood, and her content was indeed “offensive.”
“If we don’t have freedom of speech, we don’t really have America anymore,” Olsen said in a separate interview with The Daily Signal. “I want to encourage other students to stand up and use their rights and not be afraid of anyone disrespecting their opinions.”
Olsen added that she wants “our freedom [to be] acknowledged across the country and on campuses.”
“I love my school, but I love my freedom, and God, more,” she added.
The Wisconsin Institute for Liberty and Law (WILL), is representing Olsen in the case, arguing that the college’s Public Assembly Policy is “unconstitutional.”
From The Daily Wire:
According to the lawsuit, NWTC restricts students’ “expressive activities to a tiny portion of campus, requiring prior approval even within that tiny area.” The lawsuit claims this area is less than 0.5% of campus. According to Campus Reform, students must reserve the zone in advance and may only use it between 8:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. and may do so for only three consecutive days. Olsen says the zone is where students do not congregate, making interacting with other students difficult.
The lawsuit also alleges that the restrictions were applied “based upon the viewpoint expressed by the Plaintiff” and that Olsen was told she was “(possibly) disturbing the learning environment.” The lawsuit refutes this and states that she did not hand out the valentines “during any class, in the library, or in any area where students were in a learning environment.”
This isn’t the first time Olsen has handed out Christian-themed valentines and been asked to stop. In 2014, was confronted by a campus security guard for doing just that.
Olsen says that passing out Christian-themed valentines began when she was little, when she used to pass them out at hospitals and nursing homes with her mother.
When Olsen’s mother passed away five years ago, she decided that she would continue the tradition of the Christian-themed cards at her college, in her memory of her mother.
“I hand them out because of the love that God has shown me, and without that love, I wouldn’t be here because of going through losing people,” Olsen said. “I wouldn’t be able to do it without Jesus, and I want others who face desperate situations to know that love and that someone cares.”
Many free speech organizations have chimed in with their thoughts, including Karen Smits, the NWTC Vice President of Advancement.
In an interview with Campus Reform she said that “free speech is exercised every day in many different contexts all over the NWTC campus.” She added that the “policy deals with ‘public assembly’ as the law recognizes that, unlike a public park, not all physical areas of educational institutions are open for ‘public assembly.'”
Casey Mattox, a Senior Fellow for Free Speech and Toleration at the Charles Koch Institute, also chimed in, calling the college’s acts “an egregious violation of First Amendment rights.”
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“The law is very clear here,” Mattox, who has been involved with over 50 similar free speech cases, said in an interview. “Public colleges can’t tell students when and where they can speak on their own public college campus, and they certainly can’t require them to get advanced permission to speak. It’s a clear violation of the First Amendment, and it is likely the court will end up finding that here.”
Mattox added that policies like the one that Olsen is fighting against are “troubling” because they “communicate to students that your First Amendment rights only extend as far as the college wants them to extend … that’s not how it works in our system.”
(H/T: The Daily Wire)