Sometimes lines that intersect at right angles are just lines that intersect at right angles. At least that’s what defenders of this year’s edition of the Penn State White Out T-shirt claim.
Me, I see a cross.
I come at this teapot tempest independently. The first time I saw the White Out shirt at a distance — blue vertical bar down the middle transected by horizontal blue writing I couldn’t make out — it registered as a cross.
When I got close enough to see that the words were “Penn State,” I assumed the wearer was affiliated with a campus Christian organization.
When I saw that many, many Penn Staters were wearing the shirt, especially to football games, I was puzzled: Suddenly, this non-denominational public university was looking like a Bible college.
Frankly, as a Bar Mitzvah boy turned evil secular humanist, it creeped me out, though not to the extent that I wanted to organize a public burning.
This week I learned that this is the official 2009 White Out T-shirt and that I’m not the only hysteric around here who thought Nittany Nation had become a Christian republic. From a Daily Collegian story I learned that several people had complained about the shirts, that the Anti-Defamation League, which battles anti-Semitism, had looked into the matter, and that the students who designed the shirt did not intend for the shirt to be “read” as a Christian symbol.
The Collegian story, in turn, inspired a couple of letters from those who thought the shirt complaints were silly. The letters and story prompted Fox News to write a story of its own.
Next I went Googling, which is how I learned that people commented on the cross-like shirt design soon after it was adopted at the beginning of the year.
From Onwardstate.com, February 2009:
“Isn’t the graphic a bit too suggestive of Xtian cross for a team with a lion as a mascot?”
“That baby looks like a cross if I’ve ever seen one…Religion and politics have nothing to do with the Greatest College Football Show on Earth!”
“Get RID OF THE CROSS!”
From BlackShoeDiaries.com, April 2009:
“it looks like a cross, who “okay’d” this?”
“Should have just put a giant Jesus on the front.”
The other thing I learned from Googling “Penn State White Out T-Shirt Cross” is that this is a red-meat story for those who think our society is either choking on political correctness or declaring war on Christianity. The writers, citing the paltry number of complaints received by the university — six, according to the Fox story — express amazement that this is a controversy at all.
To which I respond: Who is making it a controversy? It starts with the headlines. “White Out Shirts Spark Controversy,” quoth the Daily Collegian. The Fox story, lazily, also used the words “sparks controversy.” Supportyourlocalgunfighter.com called it “Stupidest Controversy Ever.” A CBSSports.com posting asked, “T-shirt Conspiracy?”
Thus goaded, one blogger declared that a “debate is raging in Happy Valley over the appropriateness of the shirt.” Raging!
Another, spewing on the examiner.com Web site, wrote that he learned from Fox that “a gaggle of uptight, ne’er-do-well Nittany Lions had this shirt pulled from bookstore shelves.” The Fox story says no such thing, but in the echo chamber of cyberspace, that’s all it takes to set the hotheads off and ranting about “crybabies,” “far-left lunatics” and “loud-mouthed extremists” who are threatening their freedom of religion and expression.
“Free specch [sic] is a constitutional right,” wrote one Einstein. “Six morons have no right to impose their will on 30,000 people who just want to enjoy a football game.”
And then there was this comment: “It’s amazing the lengths anti-Christians will go to in order to find an issue to get upset about.”
In fact, the Penn State Hillel member who was quoted in the Collegian didn’t say anything about demanding that the shirts be pulled off the market. She just said she wouldn’t buy one herself. Even the Anti-Defamation League was satisfied, after contacting the university in response to a complaint, that the design’s resemblance to a cross was unintentional. No one said anything remotely anti-Christian.
In other words, if there’s any hysteria here it’s not coming from those of us who thought they saw a cross where others only saw intersecting lines.
Even now, though, when I look at pictures of the shirt on the various Web sites I’ve visited, I see a cross. Unlike plus signs and telephone poles and four-way intersection signs and T-bone steaks and the countless other examples of crossed lines that clever bloggers think ought to upset us equally, the White Out shirt suggests most representations of the crucifix for two simple reasons: The horizontal “bar” (the writing) is above the middle of, and shorter than, the vertical bar.
I know I may be stoking the dying fire of this supposed controversy by writing this column, but the shirt looks the way it looks, especially when you see a sea of them in the student section on a football Saturday.
