Re: Reaction to T-shirts

[hardie@qualcomm.com]

At 2:17 PM +0200 7/10/03, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
> At the risk of appearing completely straitlaced and out-of-touch.....
> I am not unworried.
>
> I am NOT very worried about this particular T-shirt or this particular person.
> I AM worried that Steve, Randy, Ted and Ned all appear to think that 
> there isn't more than one side to this issue.
In the note you forwarded, the person raised the stakes from "this 
was offensive"
to "the leadership should not express opinions".  My reaction was and is that
I didn't sign up for that and won't agree to it post-facto.   That's 
the substance
of my comment; I've never seen the t-shirt and didn't comment on it at all.

As a hypothetical, I can agree that there are cases where a t-shirt could
be sufficiently offensive that wearing it at meeting would be so distracting
or distressing that it would hinder work.  I can't imagine any such t-shirt
that actually related to the work of the IETF, but I can imagine
a few (there are t-shirts worn by abortion clinic protesters that 
show late-term
abortions graphically, and wearing such a thing on a podium is going 
to, at best,
distract anyone who sees it).  If a chair in that situation asked the 
person wearing
the t-shirt to deal with the distraction by covering the shirt or 
wearing something
else, I would back them.  But *only* if the reasoning was based on 
the hindrance
of that to the working group, not if it was based on a difference of opinion.

				2 cents,
					Ted