Pro-life Signs Disappear at Harvard
by Glen on 2001-04-09 00:01:26
In January, Harvard law student Matt Evans started
placing small yellow signs on public bulletin boards. He
puts the signs up, and others tear them down; and he
discovers that, on a liberal campus, free speech does not
include pro-life speech. The signs? They just say,
“Smile, your mom chose life,” Evans said.
His signs were placed right alongside notes for “guitar
lessons” and “free cats” – with one difference. “Unlike
theirs, mine came down,” Evans said. One day, stapler in
hand, Evans said he was spied by a university employee. A
woman walked by, then she turned around and said, “Are you
the one putting up that (expletive)?” Then she told him to
stop meddling in “women’s issues.”
Mat Staver, with Liberty Counsel, experienced vanishing
pro-life announcements while he was a student at the
University of Kentucky. “You would think at a university,
that, irrespective of the speech, people would be
tolerant,” Staver said. “But what I found is that if it’s
pro-life or religious liberty speech, there is an extreme
amount of intolerance.” His advice to Evans was to remain
persistent and constantly replace the signs as they
disappear.
Evans adds, “They (members of the academic community)
value the ability of professors to be controversial and to
say things that challenge the prevailing orthodoxy, yet
this is kind of a forbidden zone of inquiry. You don’t
push too hard on abortion.” Another recent Evans sign
reads: “Everyone who voted for slavery was free. Everyone
who votes for abortion was born. That’s how oppression
works.”
(By Stuart Shepard, Family News in Focus: