These Two Students Had Their College Newspaper Confiscated After Publishing An LGTBQ Article

These Two Students Had Their College Newspaper Confiscated After Publishing An LGTBQ Article

Jordan Ryner and Zach Schneider, both seniors at Ohio's Cedarville University, said they hadn't run into any problems handing out their independently-run school newspaper, The Ventriloquist, until this past issue.

The two suspect that their Baptist school's administration halted their distribution of the paper because of their February issue, which featured a first-hand narrative from Anthony Redic, a gay student whom their University stripped of all his leadership positions because of his sexuality.

"[Student Life President John Wood] said he was not comfortable having a gay student in a positions of leadership, and so the article was just Avery's basically first-person account of what happened with that, and I have to imagine the administration wasn't especially fond of that," Zach Schenider, Ventriloquist writer of three years, recalled in a HuffPost Live interview on Wednesday.

In addition to being "kind of one of those faces that everyone knows around campus," Redic, who went on to transfer, had been faithfully abiding by the Cedarville University policy that gay students be celibate.

Schneider noted that "this particular issue, the one that actually got confiscated, was actually not all that controversial at all."

"The move to confiscate it happened so quickly that I would be pretty surprised if they actually read it before they confiscated it," he added, suggesting that the article in February's issue is to blame for their current debacle.

University President Dr. Thomas White responded with a statement that claimed the school had "not shut anything down" by confiscating The Ventriloquist, but rather, that they had "prevent[ed] unauthorized solicitation when it was brought to [our] attention... they may freely share ideas on their website."

This hasn't stopped Schneider and Ryner from continuing to pursue their editorial freedom.

"The Ventriloquist is going to continue," Schneider affirmed. "I think if anything it's been strengthened by this."

Watch the full HuffPost Live interview with the Ventriloquist writers below:

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