Pro-Life Display Destroyed at NKU

A professor at Northern Kentucky University said she invited students in one of her classes to destroy an anti-abortion display on campus Wednesday evening.

NKU police are investigating the incident, in which 400 crosses were removed from the ground near University Center and thrown in trash cans. The crosses, meant to represent a cemetery for aborted fetuses, had been temporarily erected last weekend by a student Right to Life group with permission from NKU officials.

Public universities cannot ban such displays because they are a type of symbolic speech that has been protected by the U.S. Supreme Court.

It's all here. (H/T Michelle Malkin)

Apparently this professor isn't content with innocent lives being destroyed...she wants to destroy anyone's efforts to exercise their free speech rights to disagree with it.

Of course, she has a different take...

Sally Jacobsen, a longtime professor in NKU's literature and language department, said the display was dismantled by about nine students in one of her graduate-level classes.

"I did, outside of class during the break, invite students to express their freedom-of-speech rights to destroy the display if they wished to," Jacobsen said.

Note to Professor Jacobsen: inviting your students to stand next to the pro-life display holding signs like "Baby? You don't need no stinkin' baby!" or "Kill all you want -- you'll make more!" would be inviting them to express their freedom of speech. Destroying someone else's expression of free speech is vandalism.

She said she was infuriated by the display, which she saw as intimidating and a "slap in the face" to women who might be making "the agonizing and very private decision to have an abortion.'"

And the students whose display was destroyed were supposed to feel...?

The Right to Life organization formed last month in response to activity by faculty members on the other side of the issue.

The faculty group is called Educators for Reproductive Freedom. So far, it has held two lunchtime discussions on campus with speakers from the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood.

The group's purpose is to learn more about laws and pending legislation that affect women's reproductive rights, said philosophy professor Nancy Hancock, one of the organizers.

Pro-life students got wind of the meetings and passed out literature near the doors. They also quickly elected officers, wrote a constitution and mounted the cross display.

Hancock said she considered the student activity an overreaction.

An overreaction, huh? I wonder if it was a pro-life faculty organization that was formed, and pro-choice students had planted 400 coat hangers on campus to protest, she'd also deem that "an overreaction."

Yeah. I don't think so, either.

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