A university in Poland has banned an exhibition of T-shirts bearing slogans such as “I didn’t cry when the Pope died” and “I’ve got Aids,” saying the show was too provocative, press reports said on Tuesday.
“The texts printed on the T-shirts could have offended the feelings and beliefs of many people,” Wieslaw Kaminski, president of UMCS University in the southeastern city of Lublin, was quoted by the Rzeczpospolita daily as saying.
The exhibition featured Polish personalities wearing T-shirts with slogans that refer to subjects which are normally taboo in Roman Catholic Poland, such as “I am gay”, “I’m Jewish”, “I’m Arab,” “I masturbate” and “I have my period.”
“To write ‘I’ve got Aids’ or ‘I’ve had an abortion’ on a T-shirt, you would have to be devoid of all human feelings,” the bishop of Lublin, Jozef Zycinski, said.
The T-shirt exhibit was supposed to run alongside a film festival organised by the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, but that was cancelled in protest after the shirt show was banned.
“The aim of the exhibition was to try to provoke a debate on freedom of speech in Poland. The decision of the president of the university to cancel the show must be seen a unacceptable meddling,” the head of the Helsinki Federation in Poland, Marek Antoni Nowicki, said. – AFP