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God Bless em. They got BALLS to set up in Austin. I'd wear a flak jacket for sure.
Update: This group was at UT-Austin either yesterday or the day before.
God Bless em. They got BALLS to set up in Austin. I'd wear a flak jacket for sure.
Flack jackets, huh? It's not the first time they've been there. Just because you're prochoice doesn't mean you're going to attack people who are presenting opposing views.
In fact, if any side needs flack jackets, it wouldn't be the one who has had people killing doctors.
Um, ok?????
From Express-News Editor Robert Rivard
Robert Rivard: Anti-abortion exhibit at UTSA infringed on the rights of others
Web Posted: 03/27/2005 12:00 AM CST
San Antonio Express-News
It's a shame that the leadership of the University of Texas at San Antonio wasn't able to mount a serious legal challenge to last week's bizarre and offensive anti-abortion exhibit staged in the heart of the main campus near Sombrilla Plaza.
Students and faculty returning from Spring Break, especially those who left the city the previous week, had little or no opportunity to avoid or prepare for the tasteless and offensive visual onslaught. Instead, the morning walk to class or to the office became a forced march past 18-foot tall panels that featured photographs of bloody fetuses, black men hung from trees by lynch mobs and, worst of all, Holocaust victims of Nazi gas chambers.
The images and the linkages were obscene.
A spokesman for Justice for All, an anti-abortion group based in Wichita, Kan., told Express-News reporter Karen Adler that the point of the exhibit was to simply make "people stop and think."
Anti-abortion advocates certainly have the right to state their case, but not to the extent that they violate the rights of others. They are enjoined, for example, from violating the physical space of women using clinics — by laws that were born out of the movement's propensity for violence and intimidation. Protesters can't take over a campus with a sound system that assaults the ear and interferes with classroom discourse, to give another example.
So why couldn't UTSA officials insist that the exhibit be mounted in a manner that didn't visually or spatially assault those with business on campus?
UT System leaders, of course, want to avoid costly, prolonged litigation, not sponsor it. Anti-abortion advocates have successfully sued both the University of Texas and the University of Houston in recent years to gain broader access to campuses. It's doubtful, then, that there will be any significant challenge to Justice for All's graphic and revolting traveling road show.
A legal challenge might have made another equally important political point. Right now, different courts are offering different interpretations of what cons utes free speech and assembly.
While the anti-abortion groups have silenced any challenges to their right to assault students, faculty and other passers-by with traumatizing images, others trying to make a political point are routinely blocked or arrested. Try mounting oversized images of Iraqi torture victims on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol in a way that prevents lawmakers from entering or leaving the building without being filmed with the images as a backdrop and see how long it takes for someone to invoke Homeland Security concerns.
A poster or banner with the F-word will likely be confiscated long before the person carrying it can maneuver into the field of a television cameraman on the presidential campaign trail. Yet it is somehow OK to surround students who aren't even legal adults with images of extermination and murder alongside oversized photos of fetuses outside the womb.
I am no advocate of free speech zones, and neither were the Founding Fathers, but it's become increasingly clear in recent years that a citizen's or group's right to demonstrate or protest depends entirely on the cause or target of dissent.
Request a permit to protest the Bush administration's war in Iraq along the Inaugural Parade route, for example, and you will be assigned a take-it-or-leave-it position and an extensive list of do's and don'ts that have more to do with managing television images than public security.
The same restrictions, which often render free speech exercises meaningless by publicly marginalizing people, were enforced at last year's political conventions in Boston and New York, where protesters didn't even share the same subway stop as delegates and elected officials.
Anti-abortion advocates at UTSA last week didn't have to worry about being consigned to some guarded corral in a distant parking lot.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press; or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to pe ion the government for a redress of grievances."
Few people actually know the First Amendment, and there are surveys that indicate the majority of Americans might not support such bold guarantees today, were the matter put to a vote. The Cons ution gives every citizen the same right of expression, but protects no group from conducting themselves in a manner that infringes on the rights of others.
yeah, i saw this in the paper today. i started laughing because we had this same discussion already. it took him a week.
Could it actually be that his column runs once a week on Sundays?
haha... it could be that too!
The major flaw in that arguement, is that it fails to take into consideration that information on everything that goes up is available long before it goes up.
People actually did have time to prepare. I spoke about this exhbit with some people in the PSO because they wanted to run an exhibit countering it at the same time. They did.
The conversation was back in Janruary. We're in March. You do the math.
the PSO did a piss poor job of countering their exhibit. i didn't even know they were there.
Well, the PSO has maybe 5 active members and no funding outside of what we put in. People like you who love to complain about things don't nessecarily like to act out on that. ing or writting a column is much easier.
But, the point wasn't the counter exhibit. It was that the information on who was going to be in the Sombria had been avaialbe for a long time.
hold a fundraiser instead of ing...
We hold several. I'm just saying don't expect the PSO to have the same kind of resources as a large group such as Justice for All.
5 active members? sounds like you guys are growing! haha...
Quote:
Originally Posted by MannyIsGod
Being pro choice is not supporting abortion. It's that simple.
I agree Manny. But some don't get it.
Probably not, UTSA's student population can hardly be considered progressive.
So if a pro-life exhibit were to to put images up of the actual birth and all the blood that would be appropriate?
Would object to pro-lifers doing that on campus?
Here is my postion on this subject.......I am against abortion but it is noone's place to tell someone what to do.....I feel if you want to get an abortion it should be required to go to some ceritified class or something before you can get one....one should be required to get as much info on the subject first.
I would prefer that if someone wanted an abortion, that they should be told no, and said either you keep it or give to the authorities for adoption.
From the article:
So let's end the murderous f'ing onslaught of the unborn, then maybe this group would stop 'forcing' the ugly reality on people.Students and faculty returning from Spring Break, especially those who left the city the previous week, had little or no opportunity to avoid or prepare for the tasteless and offensive visual onslaught.
Let's think about the REAL victims...spare me the damaged psyche bull .
Funny how different arguments bring together different people. I agree with the group's right to display.
As long as it wasn't obscene and the people weren't harrasing those passing by preventing them from moving, then have at it.
I would agree with Blaze. I believe that nobody has the right to tell someone else what to do with their bodies but I support the right of those who are against abortion to assemble peacably as this group apparently did. You can tell people "I am against this" but you do not have the right to tell people "you have to be against this".
Abortion isn't something that happens to a woman's body. It's what happens to the body of the baby (or fetus, if you prefer). If it was just something that a woman did to her body (like piercing or tattooing) there wouldn't be nearly the controversy!
So the woman's body feels nothing from the effects of an abortion?
You're right Des, if you discount the whole pregnancy.
I disagree. The procedure involved with an abortion can have physical effects on a woman's body. That being said....I go back to the original topic.....I support a woman's right to choose, but the anti-abortionists have a right to express their views. My apologies for moving this off topic.
Last edited by samikeyp; 03-28-2005 at 03:32 PM.
Of course, but she chooses it. The baby (or fetus) does not. But, if you believe Planned Parenthood and the feminazis, there will be no repercussions from abortion at all except being happy about getting rid of the intrusion into your life, even though science has turned up evidence otherwise.
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