Apparently, the right to free speech doesn't apply to everyone. Especially if you happen to be pro-life.
That's the lesson the Louisiana State University Students For Life learned recently. You see, last month, in anticipation of the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, they placed 4,000 crosses on the campus parade grounds. (The 4,000 figure represents the average number of unborn children killed per day by abortion.)
It was a poignant, silent witness to the atrocity of abortion.
But even that is just too much for some people. Around midnight Monday morning, a group of pro-abortion students vandalized the display, destroying 3,000 of the crosses and using some of the others to spell “pro-choice” on the grass. All told the vandals did over $9,000 worth of damage.
Amazingly enough, one of the university police officers saw them doing it and ordered them to leave. But he didn't arrest them. One wonders if he would have acted similarly had he caught them spray-painting graffiti on a dormitory wall.
The perpetrators were later arrested and charged with criminal mischief — a misdemeanor. But is that enough? Richard Mahoney, president of the St. Mary and St. Joseph Memorial Foundation and owner of the vandalized crosses, certainly doesn't think so. The cross is a religious symbol, he noted to The Daily Reveille (the student newspaper of LSU), and “defacing a religious symbol is a hate crime.”
In an amusing exercise in rationalization, John Philip Morlier, one of the perpetrators, wrote a letter to the Reveille, defending his actions:
“I engaged in what I believe to be an act of free speech. The crosses were planted in an effort to join a debate, conversation. By removing from the ground and disassembling the crosses, I was voicing a counter point. I know that my actions were rash; however, the statement made by the crosses was rash, inappropriate, invasive, and hostile.”
Where to begin? I wonder if Mr. Morlier would appreciate my own “counter point” if I were to scratch the word “Idiot” into the side of his car? Probably not. And yet, that's the kind of reasoning he's using here with his vandalism-as-genuine-debate argument.
But it gets even better. He goes on to try to explain why he wasn't guilty of a hate crime … only to shoot himself in the foot in the attempt:
“The crosses are not an invitation to engage in a give and take debate on the issue, rather the issue is evasively hidden behind the most powerful symbol in our community. Those crosses were a black and white framing of a very complex issue veiled behind the threat of hell; a wood and glue manifestation of the self-righteous, mislabeled 'Christian' mentality that fuels itself off of the punishment it threatens or administers to those that it persistently persecutes.”
Did you catch his misstep?
When I first learned of the vandalism and the attempt to label it a hate crime, I had my doubts. After all, the crosses were used in the display to represent tombstones — objects that have taken on a secular value in our culture. Most likely, I thought, the vandals were reacting to them as such.
But Mr. Morlier shows that this is not so, thereby surrendering his single best defense. According to his own statement, he DID consider the crosses religious symbols. In defacing them, he was acting against the spiritual message he thought they communicated.
And that sounds like a hate crime to me.
Brian Saint-Paul is editor and publisher of CRISIS Magazine. You can reach him via email at editor@crisismagazine.com.
