Wearing an anti-Bush t-shirt to a presidential event will get you arrested. Wearing a Kerry sticker on your lapel will get you thrown out. Being recognized as a child of a Dem, without anything on your attire, will also get you thrown out. Wearing a pro-choice t-shirt that doesn’t mention campaigns or candidates at all will — you guessed it — also get you thrown out.
These are boundaries that cry out for some tests. Fortunately, math professor John Prather of Wheeling, W.Va., is up to the challenge.
When we last heard from Prather, he went to two campaign rallies in the same area of Ohio on the same day. He wore a Kerry t-shirt to a Bush rally and a Bush t-shirt to a Kerry rally, curious to see what would happen. Predictably, at the Bush event, Prather says he was told to turn his Kerry shirt inside out. Shortly thereafter, he was told to remove the shirt altogether. Despite complying with both requests, he was escorted away by security. At the Kerry event, meanwhile, nothing happened and Prather was welcome to stay and listen to Kerry, regardless of his choice of attire.
Prather tried another test this weekend. Things went a little better, Bush campaign heavy-handedness not withstanding.
On Sunday Prather went to hear the president speak in Wheeling, and was clad this time in what he described as a “fairly neutral” T-shirt bearing the slogan “D is for democracy” on its front and, on the back, “Q is for the questions all of us should ask. Taking part in a democracy is every citizen’s task.” (Catchy, in a civics lesson kind of way.)
After passing through two levels of security and ID checks, the professor was taken aside, he says, and asked whether he was a Bush supporter. “No,” he candidly replied, and was escorted from the building. Then a man wearing an earpiece — “who appeared to be with the Secret Service,” Prather says — asked if he had left of his own accord. Prather said no and was promptly readmitted to hear the president’s stump speech.
I’m glad Prather got back in, but I wonder what it was about the shirt that offended the Bush campaign in the first place. Was it the part about “democracy” or about “questions”?