By Matthew Freeman
Gargoyle senior editor
Posted Tuesday, April 25, 2006, The OG, news

About 80 Uni students will take part Wednesday in the nationwide Day of Silence, which is sponsored at Uni by the Gay-Straight Alliance.

According to GSA leader Shruti Purkayastha, the Day of Silence is a protest against the silence that people who identify themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender suffer every day as a result of societal prejudices.

Its main goal is to make the bullying and harassment of LGBT students unacceptable in America's schools, according to the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Network, the event's official organizational sponsor.

GSA calls for participants not to talk or communicate in any way until 5 p.m., when the day's activities will conclude with a breaking-the-silence ceremony on the University of Illinois Quad.

Because many Uni participants have sports and other commitments at that time, GSA has arranged for the main speaker, Korean transgender activist Pauline Park, to speak at Uni during lunch Thursday in Room 308.

Purkayastha, a senior, said Uni participation is down from previous years, likely because GSA has called for participants to attend meetings leading up to the protest day.

The Day of Silence project was started in 1996 and is practiced by tens of thousands of college and high school students nationwide. Last year an estimated 450,000 students in some 4,000 K-12 schools, colleges, and universities participated, according to the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Network.

In the lead-up to Wednesday's protest, Assistant Director Sue Kovacs sent out the following e-mail to students and parents:

“A reminder: Protest often brings with it consequences. Are you willing to pay the price or is this a game you are playing?

“Sometimes those consequences are positive as in change of heart or feelings for someone else or for an idea. Sometimes they can be negative as in a grade reduction for failure to participate in a class. Please note that instruction and the teacher in charge of the instruction is not out to ‘get' the student or to protest the Day of Silence if they ask you to communicate. Sometimes meaningful instruction must have an exchange of ideas via speech. If this is the case and the teacher requires a verbal exchange and you refuse to speak that is the cost of the protest to you. Don't blame the teacher. Chalk it up to the cost of protest for ideas that you believe in. Please also remember that selective protest — in the classroom but not in the hall — is not in the spirit of the day.”

The event's primary goal, to make bullying and harassment of LGBT students unacceptable, received a boost last week from a federal appeals court in San Franciso, which ruled Thursday that public schools can forbid students from wearing T-shirts that denigrate gay and lesbian students.

Reporter Henry Weinstein summarized the decision in an article published in the Los Angeles Times:

“In a 2-1 decision, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said that a T-shirt that proclaimed ‘Be Ashamed, Our School Embraced What God Has Condemned' on the front and'Homosexuality Is Shameful' on the back was ‘injurious to gay and lesbian students and interfered with their right to
learn.' The court said that the shirt can be barred on a public high school campus without violating the First Amendment.”

The case stemmed from an incident during the 2004 Day of Silence, when a student wore the T-shirt in question to his school, Poway High School in San Diego County, Calif., to counterprotest the event.