Editorial
Who's Wrong? Everyone! The votes are in, the ballots counted, and the clear winners for this issue's editorial topic is the anti-abortion propaganda that, er, decorated the EMU amphitheater on the 12th and 13th of October. Credit is due firstly to Justice For All and the Genocide Awareness Project, who may not have won too many converts, but certainly managed to open a campuswide dialogue on abortion rights. Credit is also due to several adversarial ASUO student groups, who may have been more popular with the average passerby-but were no less compromised in their handling of the situation.Republican Presidential candidates George W. Bush and John McCain have each more or less called Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling a dead issue, regardless of their own personal beliefs. For one week on the UO campus, this changed.
The display incited a counter-protest not nearly as well-financed, but at least as equally impassioned, and a good deal of conversation. It more than passed the real acid test: the Oregon Daily Emerald let point-counterpoint editorial letters carry on for days afterward, until every possible angle had been made and remade and then hammered into the ground.
Before long, the focus of the confrontation ceased entirely to be about abortion, and devolved into a muddled clash of ideals that can only go unresolved. This is everyone's fault.
It is the fault of Justice For All and the Genocide Awareness Project because their demonstration chose not to challenge the beliefs that the Roe v. Wade decision was based on. Relying on shock value, their rather presentation made no persuasive arguments against abortion, save an aesthetic one.
It is the fault of the Women's Center and Hillel, among others, who days ahead of the Project's arrival planned a counterprotest of which the foremost aspect was a wall of bedsheets intended to block out the Project's display. (One rumored excuse was that this was to protect the nearby day care from the horrific images. This didn't fly with too many people. For example, the day care is clear on the other side of the building.) The Bill of Rights doesn't have much to say on whether your freedom of speech includes the right to obfuscate another's, but it's just bad form. Both sides accused the other of "misusing" their rights as free individuals. The Genocide Awareness Project's assertion that women who abort their fetuses are using a legal (if not Constitutional) right to commit a "moral wrong" that they should not be allowed. Many signs held by the counter-protesters (and letters to the Emerald) directly accused the Project of abusing their right to free speech. Abusing a right? Someone's not thinking rationally here. In this case, it's everybody. And so it goes at the University of Oregon.
If kudos have to go to anybody, the University Administration gets the first nod. While they could have stepped in and barred the Project from campus, they instead chose not to interfere. In the equally heated aftermath, accusations were made that the Administration should have interfered. Wisely, they saw no reasonable justification to do so.
Well, they're gone now, and we've weighed in. So let's call it a draw. Everybody loses. Everybody's upset. Surprise.