Most colleges and universities are back in session. For my own institution, we are in our fourth week, and we are pretty much in the groove. However, during this time, there are other organizations that begin their regular activities also, activities that seek to disrupt and take advantage of colleges and universities in various parts of the country. An example of such an organization is Repent America, based in Philadelphia, that travels among various college campuses in Pennsylvania staging protests against LGBT people and abortion.
These are not the old-fashioned campus visitors who come to distribute New Testaments or preach in front of the student union in the hopes of saving some souls. The protests that these individuals stage consist of hate-speech. They want to get under the skins of passers-by. They want to provoke an attack, so that they can sue both the student and the institution for violation of free speech rights. This is how they make their living, by provoking attacks and then suing the perpetrator, as well as any large, well-heeled institution, for damages. They can't be excluded from coming to these campuses because, by and large, the institutions they visit are state-owned, and therefore public property. Nor can we put limits on what they say: the First Amendment is pretty clear on this.
So what can colleges and universities do to protect themselves? Make the jump over the kos-doodle to find out...
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An organization has sprung up in Pennsylvania for the purposes of diffusing the tension that these protests bring to college and university campuses. It is called the Silent Witness Peacekeepers Alliance. They seek to diffuse tension and prevent escalation in any context where protests against LGBT people may occur, such as pride rallies and marches, as well as these campus visits. The idea is to form a wall of disinterested people between the protesters and their potential audience. You see, what turns on these protesters is having people listen to them. When they have an audience, they can make ever more outrageous claims until somebody in the audience pops. Then a shouting match begins, and then the potential for violence arises. An audience is their oxygen. If there is a way to prevent a reactive audience from forming in the first place, then no one will listen to them, there will be no violence, and the group will be defeated in their purpose.
So how do silent witnesses keep an audience from forming? A group of people trained to remain passively unresponsive to their speech stand with large open umbrellas between the protesters and any potential audience. The purpose of the umbrellas is to block the view of the protesters, and their sometimes disturbing placards and posters, from the public. If passers-by stop and start to listen, other silent witnesses approach them and encourage them to ignore the protesters as best they can, and continue on their way. If any people listening lose their temper, silent witnesses are trained in how to walk the individual away from the protest and calm him or her down. You can see photos of the silent witnesses in action on the linked website. (I don't have permission to upload the photos here.) So the protesters have their full freedom of speech, but the public is protected from incitement to violence by a barrier of silent witnesses.
I think this is a fairly elegant solution to a potentially awful problem, so much so that I have become a silent witness for my own campus.
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September 19, 2012
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