Write a letter in support of Webster Cook

Exchange Florida for small town Colorado and college students for fourth-graders, and this story reads almost like an episode of Southpark. Webster Cook and Benjamin Collard face the possibility of suspension or expulsion from the University of Central Florida for walking out of a student-union sponsored Catholic mass with a communion wafer. A spokesperson has called the sacrilege a hate crime, and the university actually supplied armed police officers to guard the Eucharists at the next mass.

P. Z. Meyers has been following this story in his blog, and has, in protest, publicly desecrated a eucharist. Like the students in UCF, he has received death threats and demands that he be removed from his university. Unlike UCF, however, the University of Minnesota "affirms the freedom of a faculty member to speak or write as a public citizen without institutional discipline or restraint." The UCF, in contrast, does not extend this freedom to its students, but instead squanders that freedom and puts its students' educational futures in peril in order to pander to institutionalized superstition.

It is cowardly enough of the University of Central Florida to not stand by its students in the face of dangerous, unreasonable religious zealotry. For a public university to give religious dogma the legitimacy of serious disciplinary action, however, is unconscionable. Professor Meyers is calling for a letter writing campaign to the president of UCF. Please take a few minutes to write a respectful, proof-read, and passionate letter to John C. Hitt calling for the exoneration of Webster Cook and Benjamin Collard.

Thank you,

Sid Fisher