Every time there’s a lefty-lib protest on a college campus, presidents and chancellors cluck their tongues and seem to say that the offending students were just exercising their rights under the First Amendment, and that we shouldn’t be so harsh on them. UNC Chancellor Holden Thorp’s tepid reaction to the mob that disrupted a recent speech by Tom Tancredo is a perfect example.?
But let a group that opposes a lefty cause celebre do something similar (though not nearly as disruptively) and the tolerant academics are in high dudgeon. The minor disruption by anti-abortion protesters at President Obama’s speech at Notre Dame this weekend brought this from Trinity Washington University President Patricia McGuire (emphasis added):
The real scandal is the spectacle of ostensibly Catholic mobs
camping out at Notre Dame for the specific purpose of disrupting the
commencement address of the nation?s first African American president.
This ugly spectacle is an embarrassment to all Catholics. The face that
Catholicism shows to our new president should be one marked with the sign of peace, not distorted in the snarl of hatred.?
McGuire continued, ?The religious vigilantism
apparent in the Notre Dame controversy arises from organizations that
have no official standing with the church, but who are successful in
gaining media coverage as if they were speaking for Catholicism. . . .
They have established themselves as uber-guardians of a belief system we can hardly recognize.??
Academic tolerance of protests, it seems, is very, er, situational.
