By Charles Westmoreland
The pro-lifers who pitched camp in the quad near Davidson Hall earlier last week created the biggest stir on campus since grown men wearing sheets haunted Belknap last semester. The Genocide Awareness Project (GAP), sponsored by the Center for Bio Ethical Reform, traded their semi trucks for poster board displays, but both featured startlingly graphic, larger-than-life photos of aborted fetuses. Their message was clear, but their intention was even clearer: provoke guilt and pity through shock-value, avoiding entirely any evidence, debate or reason.
Many citizens stand on fairly neutral ground while pro-lifers and pro-choicers wage their war of morality versus liberty. Consequently, groups of both political persuasions, frustrated by a lack of public involvement in the issues important to them, sink ever lower in their efforts to persuade.
In the quad last week, more apparent than the photographs themselves were the members of the Genocide Awareness Project, who, unable to convince the populous to share their viewpoint through discourse, resolved to shame viewers into agreement instead.
Of all people, journalists especially appreciate the First Amendment. My colleague, Jason Schwalm, wrote earlier this semester that no one has to right to not be offended in their day-to-day lives. He was right. However, while speech is free, it is also easily manipulated in order to push an agenda and to do so in a manner that cannot easily be ignored. One citizen’s right to be offensive should be balanced by another citizen’s right to resist that which offends them. If you find this article offensive, you can turn the page; if you see something offensive on TV, you can change the channel. However, the campus displays were specifically designed to be unavoidable.
Members of the Genocide Awareness Project argue that they have a right to show these images in order to force the truth on the masses. Nevertheless, under no circumstance should such grotesque images be in clear view of children who are years away from making an informed decision to join either side in the debate. These anti-abortionists, driving their semi trucks plastered with disturbing photographs past a playground filled with children, are inhumane, and lacking in the very compassion for innocent youth that they claim to defend.
If university officials allow similar protests to continue, they should be prepared to allow other organizations to use the same methods. Next year, at Take Back the Night rallies, the Women’s Center should be allowed to display autopsy photos of women who were murdered by deranged spouses. African-American student activists should distribute uncensored images of victims of lynchings, castrations and other hate crimes. Will this trend continue until society becomes so acquainted with images of violence and brutality that we are no longer affected at all?
The university’s position on outside groups is inconsistent, and leaves it treading on thin ice with students. If the Ku Klux Klan is banned due to their history of violence, shouldn’t anti-abortion groups, with a long history of threats, assault and clinic bombings, also be banned? And if one argues that GAP is not banned because they themselves did not perpetrate these bombings, by the same logic that permits other white power organizations to speak or demonstrate on campus. Will groups of Muslim citizens advocating violence and “martyrdom” that have no history of violence themselves also be allowed to speak at U of L?
It’s not always about what your argument is, but how you go about proving and supporting it. The one thing the GAP proved is that they have no regard for who they target or offend, and in that respect, they are as dangerous as the thing they protest.
Charles Westmoreland is a senior majoring in English, and is Editor in Chief of The Louisville Cardinal. Contact him at: editor@louisvillecardinal.com
