News for Anarchists & Activists: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo 'Democracy isn't always pretty' 2 anti-war protesters discuss cases before WVU's ACLU chapter Jim Bissett/The Dominion Post John Tinker, of Missouri, (left) and Katie Sierra, of Sissonville, talk about free speech Wednesday night at WVU as guests of the university's ACLU chapter. Both were suspended from their high schools for speaking out against war. BY JIM BISSETT The Dominion Post Katie Sierra apologized to the audience of 40 or so people who came to WVU Wednesday night to hear her talk about civil liberties and freedom of speech. "OK, let me start over," Sierra said to the crowd in a lecture hall of the Business and Economics Building. "I get a little nervous in front of people. I'm sorry." Hardly the talk of a revolutionary, but Sierra, 15, became a reluctant one last October when she wore a T-shirt scrawled with an anti-war message to Sissonville High School. It was a month after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, and Sierra, who had also tried to start an anarchist club at her school, turned her shirt into a sarcastic indictment of the U.S. assault on Afghanistan in the hunt for suspected Sept. 11 mastermind Osama bin Laden. The wording on her shirt: "When I saw the dead and dying Afghani children on TV, I felt a newly recovered sense of national security. God Bless America." Her principal, Forrest Mann, said the shirt was offensive and inappropriate. He suspended her for two weeks. Sierra, speaking in Morgantown as a guest of the WVU chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said she was upset and scared -- but that she tried to stand her ground. "I cried," she said, "but I did tell him, 'You can't do this.' I mean, I knew my free-speech rights." When she came to school two weeks later, she was roughed up in a hallway, in full view of a security camera, she said, by four students who shouted insults and shoved her into lockers. The students went unpunished, but Sierra sued the Kanawha County Board of Education for suspending her in the first place. John Tinker, who traveled to WVU with her, knows exactly how she feels. Now a computer engineer who lives in Missouri, Tinker, too, was 15 years old when he ran afoul of the administration of his Des Moines, Iowa, high school in 1965 as the Vietnam War was heating up. He wore a black arm band to school in protest, and didn't take it off until he took his case all the way to the country's highest court. The Supreme Court ruled in his favor in a decision that expanded student rights. "It's all about democracy," Tinker said, "and democracy isn't always pretty. Sometimes you need to get in someone's face, so to speak, to start a dialogue." Tinker, softspoken like Sierra, said the Sissonville case comes down to a student being denied the right to learn and speak her mind -- simply because her school didn't agree with her. "That's all she wanted to do," he said. "She wanted to study a topic and her school said no. She was assaulted, and her school's administrators didn't do anything." Sierra, who has lived in Panama, New Mexico, Ohio and Kentucky as she moved around the country with her father -- who was first in the military, then a civilian employee of the military -- withdrew from Sissonville and is now being home schooled. Her appearance in Morgantown came one day after she and Tinker were banned from speaking to an ACLU group at Huntington High School. "All I wanted to do was start a club," she said, shaking her head. "I didn't think all this was going to happen." Andrew Schneider, executive director of the West Virginia ACLU, who introduced the pair, said Sierra better get used to it. "Civil liberty battles never stay won," he said. The trio appeared at WVU just two weeks after a group of students squared off against the university administration over the issue of specially designated "free-speech zones" that they say are consigning campus activists to outlying areas away from the students they're trying to reach. So what would have happened if Sierra had worn one of her anti-war T-shirts to WVU last fall? "Well, it was such a hot issue," ACLU campus president Mary Bess said, "that she probably would have been asked to move to the free speech zone."
