Walk through the Brickyard Wednesday through Friday and you’ll see it: a protest displaying graphic images of aborted fetuses juxtaposed with images of lynches and genocides. This is the anti-abortion display set up on campus this week. Disturbing, disconcerting, dramatic—take your pick of adjectives, but let me contend this: Perhaps this disgusting event is the best thing happening on NC State’s campus this week.
Set up by the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, a radical anti-abortion group, the protest and images the group displays are shocking. Seeing bloody images of aborted fetuses on full show, one can wonder how these photos are even allowed to be displayed. How could we allow anyone to involuntarily see this during a commute to class? But despite numerous objections, the images are displayed, and that’s what makes this event so important.
The fact that here, in the United States, anyone can protest about anything they want is what makes these bloody images beautiful. We, as a country, have decided that everyone should have the ability to peaceably assemble and say what they want. This belief is amazing and astonishing, and it’s what sets us aside from so many other countries.
If the anti-abortion protesters tried to take their graphic images to some other countries across the world, they would be stopped, their voices forcefully suppressed. And if they set up their display regardless of this other country’s disapproval, they would be jailed, punished and in some places, even killed. But here in the U.S., here in a country that not only tolerates different opinions but welcomes them, the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform is allowed to protest how it chooses.
Throughout our country’s history, the right to assemble, protest and speak your mind has done incredible things. These rights, established in the First Amendment, have given women the right to vote, ended a war in Vietnam and recently allowed gay Americans to marry in all 50 states. All of these vital actions could not have been possible if it weren’t for Americans’ right to speak their minds.
Congress’ inability to make any law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble,” a once-radical idea established by the founding fathers, has now come to be one of the paramount ideals in our society today. In this way, the anti-abortion protest represents something so much more important than the gory images it displays—it represents our ability as a country to welcome anyone’s opinion.
So, the next time you walk through the Brickyard and see the dramatic display taking place, realize the greater message these protests stand for. Above the abortion argument, above the graphic images and yelling protesters, above the whole display stands a more important significance. We should tolerate the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform’s display, not because we approve of the message the protesters are pronouncing, but because we agree that anyone can have the right to speak their mind.
Freedom of speech is not something we can pick and choose where it applies. Either everyone has it or it doesn’t exist. The anti-abortion protests are the best thing happening on campus this week because they remind us all that freedom of speech exists in the United States. I am gratified every time I see the protest not because I approve of their message, but because I realize that the activist’s ability to protest their message means that I too can say what I believe and not fear being prosecuted for my beliefs.
