The Tennessee General Assembly has passed a bill that would suspend or expel college students for walking out during a guest speaker. The same bill would allow student organizations to deny membership or leadership positions to other students based on their lifestyle. It is named after a man whose comments about Black pilots and Black women in office were described by Black Democratic legislators on the floor of the Tennessee General Assembly as things they could not call civil.

Governor Bill Lee has not yet signed it. He should not.

The Charlie Kirk Act frames itself as a free speech measure. It is the opposite. Free speech protects the right to speak and the right to respond. A law that protects speakers from being uninvited while punishing students who respond with a walkout does not expand free speech. It silences one side of the conversation and calls it neutrality. A student who stands up and leaves a room is not suppressing anyone's speech. They are exercising their own. Threatening them with suspension or expulsion for doing so is not the gold standard of free expression. It is the suppression of dissent using the language of its protection.

The bill's sponsor said the measure is nonpartisan. Democratic legislators on the floor of the Tennessee General Assembly disagreed. They pointed to professors who were disciplined in Tennessee for not mourning Charlie Kirk's death, for saying his statements were problematic, and for arguing that the way he died did not redeem the way he lived. The free speech protections in this bill did not apply to them. They do not apply to students who walk out. They apply to speakers, and specifically to speakers whose opposition to abortion or LGBTQ rights is written into the bill as a protected category.

And then there is the provision that has received the least attention and deserves the most. The Charlie Kirk Act would allow student organizations at Tennessee colleges and universities to legally deny membership or leadership positions to students who disagree with their lifestyle. There is no ambiguity about what this means in practice. LGBTQ students at Tennessee universities could be legally excluded from student organizations because of who they are. A bill named after a man described on the floor of the legislature as someone who encouraged everyone to love others would make discrimination against LGBTQ students a protected organizational right.

True free speech on a college campus means every member of the academic community has the right to speak, to dissent, to protest, and to participate in campus life without facing punishment for their identity or their views. This bill protects one set of voices while punishing another. It enables discrimination while calling it freedom. And it asks Tennessee's public universities to be neutral on divisive issues while embedding a specific ideological and cultural agenda into state law.

Sign this petition to call on Governor Bill Lee to veto the Charlie Kirk Act, protect Tennessee students' right to peaceful protest without academic punishment, and oppose any legislation that enables the exclusion of LGBTQ students from campus organizations based on their identity.