The Daily Record reports:
The University of Maryland, Baltimore County will change its facilities-use policies after a student pro-life group claimed its First Amendment rights were violated when its display featuring graphic images of aborted fetuses was moved away from a prominent public area on campus.While lawyers for UMBC said in U.S. District Court in Baltimore Friday that the school’s decision to move Rock for Life-UMBC’s display was “content neutral,” it agreed to revise rules as to when university officials are allowed to move a student group display without notice, such as inclement weather or safety concerns.
The two sides will give Judge J. Frederick Motz a joint status report Sept. 19 on the implementation of the new policy, at which point the student group can decide if it wants to continue its lawsuit by challenging the university’s speech code....
Members of Rock for Life, a registered student organization at UMBC, were given permission by university officials in mid-April 2007 to put up a display outside one of the university’s main buildings on April 30, 2007, according to Rock for Life’s complaint filed in April 2008.
The display was from the Genocide Awareness Project, a traveling exhibit for college campuses featuring graphic images of abortion sponsored by The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, a California-based pro-life group. The display consists of either 6-foot-by-13-foot posters or 4-foot-by-6-foot-posters.
But, according to the complaint, the group was told to move its display two times — once on April 25 and again on April 30 before the display was set up — to progressively “more deserted” areas on campus.
Aden said the university moved Rock for Life because of its message, noting larger events and other student groups have used the space Rock for Life originally requested....
But Sally L. Swann, an assistant attorney general representing UMBC, said the display was moved because the proposed 24 large posters would obstruct building exits and posed a fire hazard....
Lawyers for both sides met during several lengthy recesses to hammer out the details of the newly worded facilities-use policy, with the university removing the phrases “emotional safety” and “emotional harassment” from the list of reasons officials could move a display without notice....
Whether the policy was applied in a content-neutral way in this case, it seems pretty clear that "emotional safety" and "emotional harassment" language in such policies is easily usable in content- and viewpoint-based ways. Certainly the one UMBC policy that I could find that uses these terms — Article V.B of the Code of Student Conduct — seems unacceptably vague and, in its most plausible interpretation, unconstitutionally content-based (especially given that the university seems to concede that it is are applicable to displays and not just to, say, individualized threats conveyed to a particular person):
Any student found to have violated the following rules and regulations is subject to the sanctions outlined in Section C ...: ...2. Behavior Which Jeopardizes the Emotional or Physical Safety of Self or Others.
This rule prohibits, but is not limited to, the following: ...
f) physical or emotional harassment; ...
I'm not sure you get the point. Those giant posters that pro-life groups put up are there to convince you that abortion is gravely immoral because the fetus is portrayed as an innocent human being with whom you will empathize when confronted with its likeness. As an indirect consequence of that empathy, it is expected that you will then support prohibition of abortion because it "takes" innocent life.
It doesn't seem to me that depicting the aftereffects of a botched "coathanger" abortion is particularly responsive to that argument. (In fact, I suspect that argument has never convinced anyone who wasn't converted already.) The rejoinder goes: the same "innocent" fetus is still being destroyed when a coathanger is used; this destruction remains gravely immoral; the person who committed a gravely immoral (and very foolish, besides) act suffers harm. That harm is unfortunate, but hardly outside the woman's control, and in any case not as serious as harm to an "innocent."
I think pro-lifers would be very pleased to conduct the debate on the terms you propose.
I'LL TAKE YOUR DOLLARS AND GIVE YOU CHANGE. www.obamatookmydollars.com.
Not that facts matter on this issue, of course.
Oh brother...
FIRE should be able to wrap this one up in short order.
Yeah, I'm not that concerned about the well-being of murderers. Should we stop arresting criminals because jail is unpleasant for them?
You're probably right about the shock value. I confess a little personal bias here: I'm not really sure what the right level of restriction on abortion is, but I'm pretty sure it's more than we have now. In part, I just think confronting people with the "icky" side of abortion ought to be part of the debate. It seems sorta willfully blind not to.
One time the preacher had to be escorted off campus for his own safety. At some point in the discussion he lost his cool and began to shout and rant, angrily. A some point he called some girl the "Whore of Babylon"; her boyfriend promptly punched him in the face.
My point here is that most college students are, I think, quite capable of taking care of themselves. I think it healthy for people to be learn for themselves how to confront distasteful speech and actions face-on rather than having our feelings protected by "big-brother".
If, as the university claims, the exhibit actually violates the physical safety provisions, then why should the removal not stand?
Must U.M. expressly state a severability clause in its code of student conduct in order for the enforcement to stand?
Or does the baby get thrown out with the bathwater?
Throw in some pix of used tampons while you're at it, and we may put an end to the national scourge of menstruation ... a practice that a vast majority of women have engaged in.
Or punching someone in the face.
No, I liked that part. You call someone's girlfriend a whore, or even a Whore, you're taking your chances.
It would be nice if the "pro-life" movement could shed itself of its fundamental misogyny, but then it would hardly be recognizable ... contraception, daycare, and support for single mothers?
It would look too much like the Democratic Party then.
Your example seems a little closer to stalking than posters.
That's the ticket: subsidize single mothers, which will tend to produce more of them, because single motherhood is so good for children.
Heard of Feminists for Life?
Well... the last paragraph quoted from the Article says:
"Lawyers for both sides met during several lengthy recesses to hammer out the details of the newly worded facilities-use policy, with the university removing the phrases “emotional safety” and “emotional harassment” from the list of reasons officials could move a display without notice...."
On another thread, anon assures me this stuff not only will never happen. It never happens. I think he's a lawyer.
If you are forced - even if only on an emotional level - to recognize that a fetus is a distinct living thing, then you rationally should recognize that abortion should, at the very least, be subject to restriction. Just like we don't allow "puppy killing on demand."
In all my time going to church I have yet to hear anyone thump a Bible. Maybe I’m part of the wrong congregation?
You need really need to go to a fire-n-brimstone tent revival in the rural south to get the true, classic bible-thumping experience.
How does anyone expect to shock students at temple with graphic displays of gore? I mean, when was the last time you walked across campus on a Monday morning without running across a couple dead bodies left over from the weekend crime-spree?
All controversial speech has an effect on the emotions of people who passionately disagree with it. Thus, it's patently overbroad to ban such speech!
When I was a student at Harvard Law School, I published letters to the editor in the Harvard Law Record and Boston Globe criticizing an attempt to offer tenure to the radical feminist law professor Catharine A. MacKinnon, who supported curbs on First Amendment rights, and depicted most heterosexual sex as being akin to rape (a majority of faculty supported giving her tenure, but not the supermajority required by school rules).
I then photocopied and posted my letter (from the Harvard Law Record) on bulletin boards on the grounds of Harvard Law School. In response, I received an anonymous telephone call in which I was accused of "visually and emotionally assaulting" women.
I guess I was lucky I was studying at Harvard, rather than UMBC.
If I were at UMBC, maybe the caller would have accused me of "emotional harassment." And I would have been embroiled in disciplinary proceedings for that ridiculous "offense."
But fortunately, Harvard did not have a similarly broad harassment policy in force (moreover, its draft harassment guidelines at the time exempted speech from its reach if the speech was "reasonably" related to speech on matters of public concern), so I was not in danger of discipline by the campus administration.
More importantly, even abortion was nominally illegal except for the life or health of the mother, there were a surprising large number of therapeutic abortions. Oregon, for example, which had a very restrictive abortion law, had 199 abortions per 1,000 live births in 1970. Pretty clearly, elective abortions were available, even if they weren't as common as they became after Roe v. Wade.
There are a lot of people who think that Roe v. Wade was like a light switch. Some think that there were almost no abortions performed by doctors before; this wasn't the case.
Some think that there were huge numbers of back-alley abortions performed before Roe v. Wade. There certainly were such abortions, but they weren't on anywhere near the scale of today.
What really irritates me is the self-righteous tone of those who think that every person who opposes abortion as birth control also opposes contraception. This is simply not the case.