"Smut for Smut" Campaign

This week atheist students at the University of Texas at San Antonio launched a campaign called “Smut for Smut.” The campaign provides students who are over the age of 18 with the opportunity to trade in religious materials for pornography. The atheist group responsible for the campaign claims that this is based on the belief that porn is not any worse than religious material such as the Bible and the Koran. Although a majority of students reportedly disagree with the campaign, the university cannot put a stop to “Smut for Smut” because it would infringe on students’ constitutional rights.

Although it is their constitutional right to run this distasteful campaign, they are not running it to show what they believe in (or the lack there of) but, instead, to attack what others believe in. You see, the group clearly made it known that they do not think very highly of religious materials and used the comparison to porn. But if they think religious materials are just as bad as porn, then why would they take one bad thing from students just to hand them another. That’s because that’s not what they think. The atheist students clearly have no problem whatsoever with porn. Instead, they know that religious students have a problem with porn. If they make the comparison between the two, they know that religious students will be greatly offended.

Therefore, the campaign isn’t even an attempt to prove a point or to share a belief, but rather a malicious effort to offend those who did nothing but disagree with them. If they want to use their first amendment rights this way then fine, but is this really how the citizens of the greatest country in the world are going to use their most fundamental rights? Are we honestly a country where Americans go out of their way to purposely offend their fellow Americans solely because of their religious beliefs? Yes, the students do have a constitutional right to carry out this campaign – even if it is offensive and spiteful. Of course we can’t always be worried about offending others because someone will always disagree with us, but this campaign crosses the line. Is there not a certain level of decency and respect that we as human beings owe to one another simply because we are all human beings?