Liberty Minute June 19 2013

Last April, Jared Marcum, a 14-year-old junior high school student from Logan City, West Virginia, was suspended for refusing to take off a t-shirt expressing support for the National Rifle Association. The shirt featured a depiction of a hunting rifle and the phrase, ?Protect your right.? The teenager did nothing to provoke or incite any trouble; indeed, it was a teacher who angrily confronted him in the cafeteria who caused a disturbance.

Despite the fact that Marcum had done nothing wrong or disruptive by wearing a t-shirt, he was arrested ? by an armed police officer, of course ? for supposedly ?disrupting the school process.? According to his father, during the student?s detention at the police station, officers went so far as to threaten charging him with making terroristic threat. [Once again, Marcum had said nothing, and done nothing to anyone; he had been on the receiving end of abusive treatment by a teacher who objected to a t-shirt bearing an innocuous political sentiment.]

Rather than displaying the rudimentary adult maturity required to back down and apologize to Marcum and his family, local prosecutors are exhibiting the customary viciousness that typifies their profession by threatening to incarcerate him for a year and impose a $500 fine for the spurious offense of ?obstructing an officer.?

In a country ruled by a president who can murder a 16-year-old with a drone, should we be surprised that prosecutors would make a 14-year-old a political prisoner over a t-shirt?

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.