Adirondack College Students Back ‘Pagan Pride' Festival

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By MATTHEW CHAYES - Special to the Sun
September 29, 2006

After scrambling to reconsider their decision to sponsor a daylong "Pagan Pride" festival this weekend, student leaders at an upstate public college decided last night to support the festival despite outrage from Catholics who complained to trustees of the State University of New York system that the event ridicules Christianity and Jesus Christ.

The activists say the pagan festival, to be held at Adirondack Community College, located about 55 miles outside Albany in Queensbury, N.Y., constitutes hate speech that few would tolerate if other groups were being disrespected.

"Everyone knows that you couldn't even show a picture of Mohammed without them closing down an event like this — and that's because radical Muslims will kill you," the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, William Donohue, said yesterday.

Efforts to reach the organizers of Pagan Pride Day 2006 were unsuccessful, but a Pagan Pride Web site says pagans are attempting to throw off devil-worshipping stereotypes and establish themselves as peaceful and spiritual. Similar pride days are celebrated at almost 100 sites across North America, the Web site says.

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