The struggles for life and freedom of speech are deeply rooted in idealism. But this time, it's personal.
The Life Legal Defense Foundation has sued the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) after Professor Mireille Miller-Young and several of her students assaulted pro-life students during a demonstration a year ago.
Two of them LLDF Legal Director Catherine Short’s own daughters Catherine, 16, and Joan, 21.
Last March, students from Thomas Aquinas College assembled on the UCSB campus when Miller-Young, a professor of Black Studies, began screaming at them.
The lawsuit states that, as a group of her students surrounded the pro-lifers, she tore their large sign from their hands, scratching the arms of one girl. She handed the sign to her students and led them back to her office as one of Short’s daughters videotaped the entire procession and another called the police on her cell phone.
When the officers arrived they found the sign in pieces on the floor of the unrepentant Miller-Young’s office. She told them the graphic image of an aborted baby had “triggered” her actions because she was pregnant.
She felt she had a “moral right” to destroy the sign. She was setting her students “a good example,” she said.
In August, Miller-Young, a professor of Black Studies, was convicted of assault and theft, and sentenced to perform 108 hours of community service, 10 hours of anger management, $500 in fines and compensation, and three years probation.
But the students never faced any repercussions from the university.
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“All we ever wanted was an apology,” Catherine Short told LifesSiteNews, but neither Miller-Young nor the university have made a single statement of regret.
“Right now the message seems to be that professors get charged for assault but students get away with it,” Short said.
Now they have turned to the courts.
“We’re not being punitive,” Short said. “This is about the university. Miller-Young has displayed a real sense of entitlement throughout and nothing the university has done or said has indicated she was wrong to think that way. As far as we know, she has never been disciplined.”
The vice chancellor, Michael Young, “even made a statement a few weeks later blaming the pro-lifers for provoking the incident.”
Young described the protesters as “evangelical types” (although most were students at Thomas Aquinas College, a nearby Catholic school) who were “hawking intolerance in the name of religious belief.”
UCSB declined to comment to LifeSiteNews.
Short says she hopes this will help secure the rights of pro-life speakers on campus.
“I got a lot of calls when this went to court the first time from people who’ve been shoved, screamed at, and had their signs taken and torn by pro-aborts,” she told LifeSiteNews. She said while abortion militants “seem to be demonstrating absolutely irrational anger, like they’ve snapped,” in fact “there is an element of calculation, a belief that they can get away with it.”
Short noted that some excuse their behavior on the grounds that pro-life signs are too graphic, “but, in fact, they also steal or destroy innocuous little flags and crosses.”
Such suppression of speech is not uncommon throughout North America. In Canada, the Calgary-based Centre for Constitutional Freedoms recently published a “Campus Freedom Index” that failed 23 of 45 universities for repressing free speech of pro-life students or conservatives.
A recent theft by pro-abortion activists of a pro-life display of fetal models at the University of Victoria happened in front of dozens of students. No disciplinary action has been taken by the university.
