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Pro-life, pro-hatred

They’re calling the student union at Carleton University fascists because they’ve shut down the campus’s pro-life group, but really, it’s the pro-life group that’s the bully.

And that’s precisely why they been told they’ll get no funding. Earlier this week, the university LifeLine group [disturbing images within that link] was arrested for trespass by police after the group refused to campaign in the space provided for them by the university and, instead, demonstrated outside, using the provocative images that fail to meet the student union’s standard for civil debate.

LifeLine actively works against women’s basic right to choose, something activists fought long and hard to enshrine in our laws. In my view, the student union is wholly accurate in declaring that LifeLine discriminates and therefore cannot do business on campus.

Let’s put it this way. If a student group stepped in and formed a club saying blacks can’t vote, would there be any outrage over their exclusion from campus activities? No, because we get in our guts that it’s not alright to actively campaign against the rights of a specific group.

LifeLine says it’s ironic that the student union is calling the group discriminatory when the student union is discriminating against them. But that’s just weak and fuzzy thinking. Carleton’s students are treated LifeLine like any other group. LifeLine cannot campaign to deny a group basic rights, they must abide by the ideals that promote civil debate (which, by the way, is why Ann Coulter got a warning before she hit the University of Ottawa last spring) and and they have to participate in a way that respects all members of the community.

Oh, and while I’m on the subject of civil debate, it cannot have helped LifeLine’s cause that anti-abortion groups’ record on this score has been so dismal. They routinely harass those women trying to enter the building where’ they’ll get the medical procedure they’re entitled to. Most of these women are already vulnerable, wholly distressed and emotional because of the difficult decision they’ve made to terminate their pregnancy.

LifeLine is happy to use manipulative images of mangled fetuses to make their point – they were carrying them when they were arrested – and also make off-the-charts comparisons of abortion doctor Henry Morgenthaler, for example, to Adolf Hitler. It’s just not okay to triviliaze the Holocaust and Jewish experience in that way.

It’s not like a right-wing group can’t operate on campus. Go ahead. Just don’t actively campaign via vicious means. And either way, sorry but you just can’t campaign against people’s basic rights. That’s called discrimination.

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