Free Speech

 

400 copies of College newspaper with CPC ad vandalized

By Dave Andrusko
It is a free country so a Drake University professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies was welcome to hammer the student newspaper (the Times-Delphic) for the audacity of running an ad from AGAPE Pregnancy Center in Des Moines, Iowa.

Beth Younger walloped AGAPE with the usual pro-abortion subtly(AGAPE is one of “these deceptive and harmful organizations”), attempted to neutralize the impact of the ad (asking/demanding the student newspaper “publish a disclaimer next to the ad”), and demonstrated complete indifference to the facts (the entirety of her screech).
As an academic, no doubt Prof. Younger was appalled when somebody took her indignation a few steps further. Last Thursday afternoon, Austin Cannon, managing editor, found a pile of 400 destroyed copies in front of their office.

“On top of the pile was one paper with an advertisement for a pregnancy resource center circled in black marker,” reported KCCI Channel 8. The vandalism represented a cost of around $200 worth of newspaper.
The reaction of the President was straight-forward. In a campus-wide email sent out Friday, David Maxwell wrote

“This act goes beyond mere vandalism — it is an attempt to curtail First Amendment rights regarding free speech, and is thus antithetical to our core values as the Drake University community. … Those who have concerns about the agency that paid for the advertisement have every right to express those concerns and to catalyze debate, as Prof. Younger has done in her letter to the editor. But we should all be outraged by an act that not only entails the destruction of others’ property, but is intended to communicate a message in a manner that violates our sense of who we are and what we stand for as a university.”

In a television interview on Channel 8, Editor-in-Chief Courtney Fishman said

“It’s just a little disheartening to me because it doesn’t mean we support the organization, and we’ve run ads from Planned Parenthood in the past. So it’s interesting to me that people are upset about it, and they’ve very welcome to be upset about it, but it’s upsetting that they’re vandalizing our property.”

Fishman told the Des Moines Register that he paper will “absolutely” continue to publish ads from Agape, despite criticism.

One other note. In his email, President Maxwell also cited the letter from Prof. Younger as a way “to catalyze debate.” Younger’s name was not mentioned in any story about the vandalizing that I could find [Editor’s note. I subsequently found her name mentioned in a UPI story], nor her outlandish slurs against AGAPE addressed.

What outrageous things did the ad say? The headline is “Think you might be pregnant?” followed up by “Free pregnancy tests” and “Free ultrasounds.”
What will those villainous pro-lifers think of next?

Source: NRLC News