Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
Thanks to Nick Matzke for finding this story about the situation at Northern Kentucky University, where an English professor led a group of students in destroying a perfectly legal anti-abortion display on the campus there. The story includes a picture of the professor tearing apart the display's main sign and shows all the crosses broken apart on the ground. The police say they're investigating it as felony theft and vandalism and I think they're absolutely right. It doesn't matter how offensive they found the display and it doesn't matter that the teacher felt "violated" by it. They had no legal right to destroy it and they did over $600 worth of damage to someone else's property and that is against the law. And the school's president, Jim Votruba, really understands what free speech means:
"I am very disappointed that this happened," Votruba said. "At a university, the opposing views should be able to bump up against each other. Responding with pamphlets or speeches would have allowed the power of ideas to compete."
Precisely. The answer to free speech that angers you or offends you is to exercise your own free speech to counter it. If instead you engage in theft and vandalism, you're a felon and an autocrat. And if you do that while claiming to be exercising your free speech, then you're an imbecile and a hypocrite as well.
I should also note that a group of pro-choice educators condemned the act:
In a letter to The Northerner, signed by Nancy Slonneger Hancock, a member of The Educators for Reproductive Freedom, Hancock said that the group "neither knew about nor participated in this act of vandalism, and we most certainly do not condone it." Hancock said that the group sees the cross display as "protected free speech, no matter how strongly we may disagree with the message. It is of the utmost importance that we all respect each others' free speech rights."
The more people realize that the rights of others don't end whenever they say something that bothers you, the safer our liberty will be.
Comments
Aside from being a criminal act of vandalism, it is also the sort of juvenile barbarism that dillutes the message to the lowest common denominator instead of the highest.
Posted by: Treban
| April 14, 2006 10:16 PM
it was probably mob psychology. there are many liberal arts classes where non-liberals are demonized as semi-human. i know, i was a history minor and would have stand up for the non-liberal perspective now and then during class during operational consciousness raising. people would then be shocked when i didn't fit in their preconceptions of a non-liberal (that is, i was an atheist brown dude who had libertarian leanings).
Posted by: razib
| April 14, 2006 11:13 PM
Good. Let me join them. (Hopefully the prof will get a clue when the lart is wielded by her ideological bretheren). Calling the vandalism free speach is stupid--it is "speach" certainly, but that's not all it is, and it is not the speach part that is at issue. Even if the vandalism was justified (it's not), that doesn't somehow make it free speach.
Posted by: Andrew Wade
| April 14, 2006 11:21 PM
Ed is correct, but it's even worse. Treban expresses it succinctly
These amateurs made themselves reckless, clueless political agents for the other side. They're morons exactly like the War-on-Easter's author is a moron. [See my rant there.]
It's our responsibility to ostracize such self-centered, neurotic, uneducated thinking. Future such acts must be deterred because, I guarantee, such stupidity cannot be detached from our cause in the public's mind. The struggle, the battlefield, and the stakes are immense and they're all inside that 3-pound wonder.
Posted by: SkookumPlanet
| April 14, 2006 11:24 PM
I read Ed's first post after I commented here. I left this there, but it's relevant here also.
Jim Ramsey has it right. But Nick misses the point, even stipulating his original points correct. Policies, schmolicies -- that's fantasyland. There are smart, effective ways to counteract and neutralize the opposition. Then, as here, there are irreversably myopic, neurotic, ignorant attempts that instantly transmute into doing the opposition's work for them.
10 students and 1 prof are responsible . Who gave this teeny group authority to act on behalf of millions? Now, campus pro-lifers plan to restore the display and mount a "vigil" to "protect" it. The all-important "emotional" message making it through the mass media is "Pro abortionists destroy, pro-lifers protect and save." This is moronic enough to have the prof fired and the students flunked out permanently. I can't adequately express the stupidity of this. Words fail.
Posted by: SkookumPlanet
| April 15, 2006 12:01 AM
This incident is one more tutorial on how, but especially why, the far right is flushing the left down the toilet. It's suicidal behavior.
Posted by: SkookumPlanet
| April 15, 2006 12:09 AM
the problem has never been anti-abortion philosophy, but the desire to force people into behaving according to one's view. when these retards take physical action, they not only indulge in the truly problematic behaviour of their opposition but also move us further away from the solution by reinforcing religious notions that cultural disagreement is a battle which needs to be won by physical force.
Posted by: snaxalotl
| April 15, 2006 1:49 AM
I'm confused-- why were the right to life students allowed to erect a pro-life display on university property in the first place?
Posted by: Gretchen
| April 15, 2006 6:12 AM
Gretchen, that was my first question when I read the post and the article. Government can impose reasonable time, place and manner restrictions on speach, as long as they are content neutral, and it isn't clear that the location of the exhibit would--or would not--have been a location at which exhibits of any sort were permitted.
But that's neither here nor there. If the instructor and her hooligans believed that the location was not one at which exhibits were or should have been permitted, what they should have done was to complain to the administration, not commit acts of vandalism.
Posted by: raj
| April 15, 2006 6:56 AM
Oh, indeed. I didn't mean to imply otherwise. I just didn't know that universities had license to allow students to erect semi-permanent displays (as opposed to marches, protests, etc.) to promote a political message.
Posted by: Gretchen
| April 15, 2006 9:47 AM
Gretchen
Oh, indeed. I didn't mean to imply otherwise.
And I didn't mean to imply that you did.
But you did raise a good question.
Posted by: raj
| April 15, 2006 10:25 AM
Gretchen-
Such displays are not unusual on college campuses. A lot of campuses have a place that is traditionally considered an open forum where students and student organizations can engage in protest of whatever is bothering them at any given moment. When I was at MSU, for instance, a bunch of student groups set up a "shanty town" to protest US policy toward South Africa and it was there for weeks. They also allowed counter protests, actually, and the College Republicans set up their own shanty, complete with a white picket fence and a lawn jockey. Raj is right that colleges can place time, place and manner restrictions on such protests as long as they are content neutral, but that doesn't mean they have to do so. Every college is going to have a different approach to it and NKU's administration, judging from the president's remarks, is to allow even large, relatively long term displays like that. But there certainly isn't anything unusual about that. I've seen similar displays on campuses all over the country at various times.
Posted by: Ed Brayton
| April 15, 2006 11:01 AM
We had a similar display at our university this week. Our president is pretty good about free speech. When the College Republicans had a bake sale where they were selling cookies cheaper to people of color than caucasians (or maybe the other way around, I forget) he came out in their defense even though he is an African-American. So he gets it.
Posted by: george.w
| April 15, 2006 2:29 PM
If instead you engage in theft and vandalism, you're a felon and an autocrat.
Ok, let's take a deep breath and regain some common sense. I don't consider the kind of vandalism that they did to be worthy of a felony. These were college kids, and I don't think this act is so egregious that they should go to prison for a minimum of a year, or even if they get less jail time, lose their right to vote.
They didn't burn a car or destroy something particularly valuable or irreplaceable, even if it was worth $600.
Posted by: Martin Striz
| April 17, 2006 12:41 AM
Martin Striz wrote:
Well, like it or not, vandalism over a certain dollar amount is considered a felony in Kentucky and that is what they're being investigated for.
Posted by: Ed Brayton
| April 17, 2006 10:04 AM