By Jonathon Van Maren
The reporter from the Sheridan College newspaper stopped me as we were making our way out the door. He gestured back at the hallway full of irate protestors with their armloads of fabric and hastily scrawled signs. “You guys know that some people are going to be angry when you come here,” he said, sticking a tape recorder in my face. “So why do you come back?”
The staff and volunteers at the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform have been touring colleges across Ontario this fall doing pro-life outreach, and of course this has triggered much conversation on the concept of “safe spaces” by the students and staff who expect colleges to be free of discourse that they find uncomfortable. Today, we were engaging students and having interesting conversations when a clique of protestors with signs showed up and began to position themselves around us.
It’s always interesting to me that on a campus, of all places, students feel it reasonable to complain about the “graphic nature” of our displays, especially considering that campuses host all sorts of graphic displays highlighting all sorts of different issues. I always wonder how many complaints are received by those who hang up promo posters for The Walking Dead or protests put on by PETA. The question answers itself, obviously. These students are not protesting “graphic pictures.” They are protesting photographs of abortion victims, because they don’t want people to see what happens to abortion victims.
Example? I checked out the Twitter feed for Sheridan College, and saw one of the protestors tweeting out her opposition to us with a photo of her holding a sign that read “Our body, our choice.” The tweet just below it, which she had sent out just the day before, showed a picture of a chicken with a punctured neck and featured the caption: “There is no way to humanely kill someone who if given the choice would choose to live!” It takes some staggering cognitive dissonance to justify the dismembering of a developing human being—one of our own sons or daughters—while protesting the savagery of eating chicken. But as G.K. Chesterton once noted, “Where there is animal worship, there will be human sacrifice.”
One girl stopped in front of my sign and peered past the two protestors in front of it. “Wow. Wow. Is that what happens to the baby during an abortion?” I told her yes, and handed her a pamphlet. She stared a while longer, and then nodded. “This is seriously educational. Thank you for being here.” The protestors flinched. Conversations were still happening. People were still seeing the truth. How could they stop it? One of them had the answer.
She began handing out huge white bedsheets, and instructed her minions to spread the sheets out in front of the signs so that no one could see them, even if they wanted to. I’ve seen this tactic used on other campuses, too—some protestors going so far as to actually attach the sheets to sticks and hoist them high. I wasn’t surprised, really. The slogans on their signs were nearly identical to the slogans used forty years ago by the abortion activists—they’ve come up with nothing new since then, although the “Hail Satan—Abort Everyone” sign was a bit raw, and the “Being Evil Makes Me Happy” pin on one girl’s backpack was a bit too honest. That, and for some reason people who seek to discriminate against another group of people for arbitrary reasons seem to have penchant for using white bedsheets. At least, the tactic certainly seems somewhat familiar…
My wife Charmaine was standing across from the signs, chatting with a group of students who were buying coffee. One student asked her if she was pro-life, and began asking her questions. He was shocked to find out that nearly three hundred babies are aborted every single day in Canada. Another student took a pamphlet, flipped through it, and thanked her for being willing to come to the campus. One student called out to a girl walking nearby, “Hey, you should take more information for that girl who’s thinking about having an abortion!” Charmaine soon ran out of pamphlets.
An red-haired student marched up to my sign, looking quite irate. “You’re pro-life, right?” she demanded. “Yes,” I responded, preparing a for hostile discussion. To my surprise, the girl pointed at the protestors trying to cover my sign with a bedsheet. “Are they allowed to do this? This isn’t allowed, right?” I told her we were talking to security about it, and she nodded. “Thanks for being here. I’m with you guys. I had my little boy when I was eighteen.”
Up and down the halls of Sheridan College, in spite of the protestors, my colleagues were still having good conversations, showing people the truth, and connecting with them. Many students were not fooled by the flapping and chanting of those who showed up to silence debate rather than engage in it, and many students actually thanked us for being there. Those students, of course, will not be interviewed by the school newspaper, and will be ignored by those loudly calling for censorship. After all, some are now realizing that there is no such thing as a “safe space” for bad ideas, no matter how hard college faculties try to create them.
That’s why we come back.
Editor’s note. This appeared at End the Killing.