April 27, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Pro-life advocates, pro-family organizations, and traditional Christians do not expect to get a fair shake in the media, but the dogged, seasoned journalists of the prestige publications have overlooked a disturbing new trend: an increasing number of left-wing activists claim that destroying or defacing other people’s property is part of their First Amendment “free speech” rights.
At LifeSiteNews.com, I have reported on the desecration of a pro-life display at Western Kentucky University. After a campus pro-life group got university permission to set up 3,700 crosses to represent the number of children aborted every day, a student named Elaina Smith placed condoms over each one. When a pro-life student confronted her, Smith complained, “I think it’s kinda weird that you’re allowed to express yourself, and I’m not.” Her art instructor, Kristina Arnold, gave her permission to deface the crosses as an “art project,” defended her actions, and may give her college credit for her act of vandalism.
Earlier this month at Northern Kentucky University, pro-life students hung up baby clothes and marked every fourth one with an “X” – symbolizing that one of every four babies is aborted – only to have their work destroyed. One of the left-wing students who dismantled it, Kyle Pickett, told the Kentucky Post, “Tearing it down was expressing our right to free speech.”
The actions follow another incident at NKU in 2006, when women’s studies professor Sally Jacobsen was fired after she incited her students to tear down a pro-life display of crosses. In an Orwellian turn-of-phrase she admitted, “I did…invite students to express their freedom-of-speech rights to destroy the display if they wished to.” Her behavior was doubly acceptable, Jacobsen claimed, because her feelings were hurt. “Any violence perpetrated against that silly display was minor compared to how I felt when I saw it,” she whined. “Some of my students felt the same way, just outraged.”
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What Jacobsen, et. al, describe is not the exercise but the extinguishing of free speech. The notion that if someone objects to a message, he may prevent others from expressing it is formally known as a Heckler’s Veto and is a violation of the First Amendment.
And of course, vandalism is not “speech” at all. Destroying other people’s property is not a missive; it’s a misdemeanor. It is also thuggish, imperious, and fascistic.
One can hardly be surprised when such notions of entitlement to the use of force bleed over into, well, the use of force. On Tuesday, a group calling itself the “Angry Queers” threw rocks through 100-year-old stained glass windows at Mars Hill Church in Portland. Its crime? The pastor of another church, with which it happens to be affiliated, said homosexuality is a sin. The local pastor, Tim Smith, agrees but has reached out to the local homosexual community to find common ground.
The possibility of human harmony and reconciliation was more than the liberal activists could bear.
In the wee hours, masked protesters threw baseball-sized rocks through nine church windows, causing thousands of dollars in property damage. “We hope this small act of vengeance will strike some fear into the hearts of all of Mars Hill’s pastors,” they wrote in an e-mail to a Portland TV station. Although there are apparently two versions of their statement, both included the line, “The only dialog we need with scum like Mars Hill is hammers through their windows.”
No media source reported the homosexual activists’ intent to terrorize their political opponents, nor that they committed themselves to violence in perpetuity. In effect, Big Journalism’s gatekeepers collaborated with the extremists to make them look more mainstream.
Can one believe for a moment if a pro-life organization – “The Fetus Fanatics,” let’s say – had thrown bricks through an abortion mill’s windows, dropped the f-bomb on any Christian who talked to the other side, then incited further violence, the media would be so docile?
Reporters in the liberal media have detected 50 of the last zero acts of “pro-life terrorism,” and zero of the last four anti-Christian hate crimes. After a certain critical mass, one has to assume the oversight is intentional.
As these rage- and bigotry-fueled acts go unreported, and unpunished, one has to wonder: What will their perpetrators do next?
It’s All Been Done Before
The other side believes it has the inalienable right to silence speech of which it disapproves and to destroy property used in the commission of thoughtcrime. What is the next step – breaking up pro-life meetings like the brown-shirts of old, so the other side cannot express itself in the first place?
Sadly, that has already been done. Extremists have been invading and shutting down Right to Life meetings all year. Occupy Wall Street interrupted the March for Life Youth Rally in Washington, D.C., and threw condoms at Catholic school girls at a pro-life event at the Rhode Island statehouse. The campaign of intimidation is well underway.
If we are already to that point, what will come next? The right to batter, maim, or kill someone whose speech might offend you? As remote as it seems, recent history teaches us the rationale for war creeps inexorably from defense toward preemption. If social mores allow you to attack someone after an offense, why wait until it is inflicted?
That, too, is already a reality.
The right to preemptively kill another person, not only for inflicting harm but who may potentially inconvenience you in any way, is already legal. It’s called abortion.
The self-centered disdain for others is the logic that ties the action and its advocacy into one seamless, violent continuum.
As this month’s entitled acts of desecration prove, their disrespect for others and pursuit of autonomy at any price does not end at birth.
This article originally appeared on TheRightsWriter.com and is reprinted with permission.