How dare those pro-lifers get in the way of free speech!
Posted by Mathew | October 20, 2009 | 1 Comment
After jumping through all obstacles with Canadian McGill University officials and the campus Student Union, event organisers were able to schedule, advertise to students and hold on campus a presentation addressing the issue of abortion. However, the event shortly went pear-shaped when, no sooner had the host introduced the guest speaker, and barely had the speaker an opportunity to complete his opening sentence, that a group of rowdy pro-life protesters disrupted the presentation.
Though small in number, these pro-lifers swore at the guest speaker and proceeded to hijack the event, gathering in voice and breaking into renditions of children’s songs for almost two hours until such a time as University officials closed the event down as the building required to locked for the evening. In the lead up to this time, University security appeared powerless to remove them and then, finally, nearer toward the end, police stepped in and made two arrests. After the police left, however, the chanting started again until the building was finally closed.
The protesters were certainly effective in one thing: preventing the speaker from speaking. Unfortunately for their cause they were lacking in a number of things: among them being maturity, intelligent rebuttal and tolerance of a scientifically-sound and logically reasoned presentation.
All of the above actually happened except for one minor detail: the protesters were not pro-lifers. They were pro-aborts.
Think I’m kidding? Think again – I couldn’t believe this when I saw it over at Life Training Institute blog.
If you survived more than 3 mins of that atrocious demonstration, you did well. Apparently, that’s only part one of 19. The protesters really did carry on for nigh on two hours.
Intolerant demonstrations like this are not an isolated event, least of all not in Canada. The same speaker, Joso Ruba, co-founder of the Canadian Center for Bioethical Reform, has had other presentations disrupted in a similar manner. Protesters at his presentations, such as the one depicted in the video, jump up in front of projectors to prevent the audience from seeing any of the content depicting the graphical horror that is abortion. Some universities, as a result of these pro-life presentations being forcefully disrupted by pro-aborts, are now electing to screen presentations for controversial content before giving approval for such events.
So much for the intellectual domain of our higher education institutions. If you can’t challenge ideas at universities, where can you challenge them? As is noted elsewhere on the Life Training Institute blog, such practices at universities, by their lack of action to step in and control these types of aggressive protests, advocate indoctrination over free speech.
Given as such, is there really any choice in “pro-choice”?
Read a little more over on at Eternity Matters and Wintery Knight.
Pro-life resources:
- Scott Klusendorf’s The Case for Life at Amazon.com
- Life Training Institute
- Canadian Centre of Bioethical Reform
- abort73.com
- Stand to Reason: Abortion
Related Thoughts out !oud posts
Tags: abortion > Apologetics > free speech > intolerance > Jose Ruba > prolife > Scott Klusendorf > tolerance
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October 21st, 2009 @ 9:22 am
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