The free speech advocacy group FIRE reports that a legalized abortion advocacy group at Johns Hopkins University his attempting to silence a group of pro-life students:
Recently, FIRE successfully defended the rights of the now-recognized Johns Hopkins University student group Voice for Life (VFL). As Torch readers may recall, VFL was wrongly denied recognition in March due in part to student government leaders’ personal disagreements with VFL’s viewpoint and activities. Members of Johns Hopkins’ Student Government Association (SGA) also claimed incorrectly that the group’s planned “sidewalk counseling” activities violated Johns Hopkins’ harassment policies—a position the university’s Office of Institutional Equity rejected. Fortunately, the SGA’s judiciary committee unanimously overturned the rejection, granting the group recognized status.
As Hopkins’ News-Letter student newspaper reports, this sequence of events has inspired the formation of an opposing group, calling themselves Voice for Choice (VFC). This is all to the good, right? What isn’t there to admire from a free speech perspective about one group inspiring the formation of another group to provide a different, opposing message? The answer to speech you don’t like, as FIRE always says, is more speech.
Unfortunately, the News-Letter‘s report presents some cause for concern.
The ultimate goal of the movement is to eliminate harassment on campus. Voice for Choice takes issue with Voice for Life’s club activities, including sidewalk counseling and approaching pregnant women.
“The problem is not that they want to express their views, but that they want to use harassing tactics,” [VFC member Caitlin] Fuchs-Rosner said. “The tactics they want to use could be triggering for rape victims, but the administration did not do anything about that.”
She believes that Voice for Life’s activities will harass legally protected classes of people — women and pregnant women.
VFC’s Facebook page goes even further than that, stating that VFC “will be circulating a petition online and on campus to garner student/alum support for an official harassment complaint.”
This, of course, is deeply troubling. For one, VFL’s “sidewalk counseling”—the lawful engagement of persons outside of (and often at some distance from) facilities that perform abortions—is not unprotected harassment. Vice Provost for Institutional Equity Caroline Laguerre-Brown made this clear in her April 3 letter, in which she found that this activity “would not constitute harassment within the meaning of” Johns Hopkins’ harassment policies. Further, she stated that this type of speech was “fully in accord with the university’s robust commitment to the values of free expression and open debate.”
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