Misguided Canadian Students and Their Foolish Fear of Ann Coulter

As I consciously avoid paying attention to Ann Coulter, I hadn't heard about her scrum with Ottawa University until attending a terrific panel discussion featuring Sheila Kennedy and Erin Rosenberg last Thursday at Butler University (GO BULLDOGS!) entitled "Rights and Wrongs: Achieving Civil Discourse."



Coulter was invited by a conservative student union to speak on campus, and a protest wave ensued. The Vice-President of the University even e-mailed Coulter to remind her, in the words of the Huffington Post, "to watch her mouth."

The short version is that Coulter was told that Canada lacks the same defamation protections as America, and further, has criminalized "hate speech."

Coulter spun the e-mail as Ottawa University creating a "climate of hate." (Kudos to Coulter for acknowledging for the first time that humans can adversely affect a climate!) Student protestors by the hundreds appeared and shouted Coulter down and, ultimately, the lecture did not go forward.



Coulter and Fox News made it sound like some liberal gestapo shut down the event, though the Vancouver Sun reports that the conservative organizers told campus security the event wouldn't go forward because of "safety concerns."

Ahh, to be young, idealistic, revved up, and so utterly stupid again!

Apparently, it's time for Professor iPOPA to teach the young whipper snappers a thing or two about public relations in politics.

First, the media loves controversy, and Ann Coulter IS media.

Second, controversy can't happen if only one side plays the game.

Third, somebody who does professional media for a living will almost always outspin you and make you look like a complete jackass.

Let's think this through.

Fifteen hundred kids spent who knows how many hours organizing protests, spreading "the word" to stop Coulter from speaking hers, and actually took their evening off to chant, "Ann, go home!" Why? Because they said you wanted to ensure their University was not a discriminatory place.

But you know what they actually did?

They made Ann Coulter a First Amendment hero, they proved everything she says about how "tolerance" toward other ideas is a one-way vehicle for "liberals," they gave their own University and country a huge black eye, and they deprived some independent-minded people who didn't know Coulter of the opportunity for her to say something insensitive that might prompt them to conclude on their own that she's a vapid, intellectual-bereft puff pastry.

Dr. Phil gets mocked, but he asks this great question: "Do you want to be right, or do you want to do what works?"

Here, some college students wanted so desperately to be part of some morally superior ("right") direct-action tactic, they got completely owned.

Any college kids thinking about leading a similar protest against a speaker, please remember that if you must make yourself part of the story (which you'll admit if you're objective is a bit self-indulgent because it's about you), make these your actions:

(1) don't protest the coming of the speaker;

(2) don't go;

(3) take your 1,500 people and on the same night and time, build houses for Habitat for Humanity or engage in some other philanthropic venture that supports multiculturalism; and

(4) issue a brief statement saying, "While Ann Coulter is tearing down our neighbors, we are building together."

Seriously, do you realize how many collective hours you wasted (that could have been spent constructively) just so Ann Coulter can tell this story of liberal persecution in her next book?

I don't want to be too hard on the students because they are not alone. Every time a klan or skinhead rally is announced, everybody wants to do a counter-protest. Do you know that nobody covers six klansmen walking down the street, except ironically? It's only when somebody plans a counter-protest that the media will cover the story because you've given it "balance." (I promise you there are news editors praying somebody will organize a counter-protest in every instance).

But try telling people who love to be in front of cameras and microphones and who covet having their followers see them as "action-oriented" that the best play is not to play at all. Some are so blinded by the spotlight, they don't realize that they put the klansmen in it with them.

In other words, to paraphrase that classic philosophical connundrum, "If an Ann Coulter appears in an auditorium but nobody is there to hear her fall, does it make a sound?"

Not a notable one, unless you foolishly amplify her.

Misguided Canadian Students and Their Foolish Fear of Ann Coulter

Purdue Gets It Right on Chapman; Students....Not So Much!

Ahhhh....the young....so idealistic and ignorant of public relations!

I might get grief for this, but...(1) Purdue University was absolutely right not to bow to student demands for the termination of professor Bert Chapman, and (2) the students, though well-intentioned, "chose poorly."

Calls for Chapman's ouster came after he posted comments about the alleged economic costs of homosexuality on his conservative blog.

The First Amendment says: "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech." Too many Americans who haven't actually read the passage think "the First amendment" means speech without consequences. It doesn't.

The focus is on government stiffling free speech, not private individuals (or even groups of students). This is why I said "knock yourself out" when a bunch of good old boys with belt buckles bearing their names crushed Dixie Chick CDs with a steamroller. I said the same thing when people protested Don Imus and Lou Dobbs, as well as when conservatives boycotted the Teletubbies because one carried a purse and had a triangle on his head. (As an aside, did anyone else find it amusing that conservatives branded Tinky Winky gay while somehow missing that two of the other Teletubbies have phalluses coming out of their heads?)

Individuals and groups can protest, and they can boycott. But when they start trying to force government entities like public universities to take sides on a moral debate, they've crossed the line. In addition, if freedom of expression deserves extra protection anywhere, isn't it on a college campus, the alleged bastion of academic freedom?

Too many people in my party try to stifle dissenting views they find deplorable. We must ask more from ourselves, or we'll get trapped in the same yoke when the political tide turns. Remember the plea from The American President?

"You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center-stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Now show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free."

Maybe it's the lawyer in me, but I get nervous when people try to stop others from raising questions, and that's what's transpired here.

I read Chapman's piece because I didn't want to be one of those folks who criticize without first-hand knowledge. Chapman asks, in an admittedly semi-demagogic and only semi-scholarly way what we could have achieved healthwise had we not spent billions on AIDS funding.

While I say, given how the federal government's tragic inaction in the early 1980's permitted the proliferation of HIV, sums spent thereafter were necessary, isn't the most fundamental question a citizen gets to ask his government, "What was the next best alternative for the dollars you spent?"

Chapman's piece is undoubtedly anti-gay, as it classifies homosexuality as "aberrant." But it does something else that is not customary in gay-bashing screeds - it classifies all sex out of heterosexual marriage as aberrant and costly to society.

This is noteworthy because many Republicans/conservatives tend to draw the lines of acceptable conduct right at the ledge where they stand, which is why a staggering number condemn homosexuality while also being serial adulterers. Chapman seems intent not to let them off the hook, and if he cannot ask his questions on a private blog without fear of the governmental hand slapping him down, where can he?

Now, do I think Chapman's comments are wrong? Yes. But this is precisely why I do not fear their injection into public discourse. If Chapman's views are off-base, they will not take hold, we'll win on the merits, and Chapmans of the world fade into obscurity.

That didn't happen here.

My hope is that one day the self-aggrandizing who are so eager to lead protests will realize that the main byproduct of their actions is nothing but heightened publicity for the ill-formed view and its purveyor. I promise you, Chapman is now a political martyr for the right and his blog traffic has gone up 1,000 fold.

Maybe it's the students who needed to be shut up.

Purdue Gets It Right on Chapman; Students....Not So Much!