I saw this protest at Georgetown Saturday and speculated with one of my colleagues what they might be protesting (no one was yelling over the megaphone when I walked by). Not knowing the point of their protests, I was annoyed by their manner of protesting. It isn't as if people chained themselves symbolically to things as a manner of creating a spectacle in the past (although I'm sure that these Georgetown kids aren't the first ones to do so)--no, people chained themselves to things so that the police couldn't remove them (at least not quickly). I'm thinking here of Margie's grandmother in Margie, who had chained herself to the White House to argue for women's suffrage. But this Georgetown chaining seemed to be pure spectacle and novelty for its own sake--it wasn't like their protest was difficult or painful or that they might get thrown in jail. No, they were amusing themselves by making a scene.
I mean, I don't know, perhaps they feel that having to walk off campus to get a condom is a severe infringement on their rights. But it seems silly to me to put this "right" beside voting for women or the civil rights movement in the 60s, which are weighty and important issues.
3 comments:
I'm actually not convinced that it's prima facie silly. There's at least a case to be made for a right to privacy which includes the right to conduct one's sexual life in the manner one sees fit. The fact that Georgetown is a private institution would be no more relevant, on this view, than that the segregated Woolworth's in Greensboro was private. Now of course they may be wrong, but they're not obviously wrong.
As a historical matter, it also does not help that the weighty and important issues of women's rights and civil rights were treated as silly at the time they were being fought.
That said, all college protesters are annoying, but this is much more a function of their being 18-22 year olds than any feature of their ideology.
Not sure if I was clear--what stuck me as absolutely silly was fake chaining yourself to a statue. It turns actual methods of protesting into a symbol. So people in the past actually chained themselves to things so that police had to cut them off before taking them to jail. At Georgetown, there was nothing at stake for these students--the chains were a gimmick. All of this was quite aside from the subject matter.
As concerns the subject of their protests--I think that a protest regarding the right to privacy regarding to sexuality is a weighty matter. What I can't understand is the demand that Georgetown as a school is being asked to provide them with condoms. That's the silly point. (Georgetown also doesn't sell toothpicks and so my right to pick at my teeth is violated.) I'm not saying it wouldn't be a serious issue if Georgetown outlawed condoms on campus.
1. In this context, I think even the people who first chained themselves to things as part of a protest were doing it both for the symbol and the gimmick.
2. I'm not sure the toothpick example works because, so far as I'm aware, there's no great debate about the morality of toothpicks (well, not this century, anyway).
Then again, when I was in college there was a great outcry when it was announced the state was going to start charging a standard deposit on the purchase of kegs. College students get worked up over the strangest things.
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