I speak English, Spanish, and Freedom...

Just walking to the Union (oops, I mean Memorial Student Center 'cause union is still quite a radical concept here) here at A&M, one gets the sense of how brute force conservative this place is. The heavy right hand of judgement is out there in full force protesting against abortion today. As I was trying to weave through the people handing out flyers, I got caught right before I hit the door of the Union. To remain civil, I simply stated to the woman handing out the flyers with a rotting corpse of a 7 week old aborted fetus on the front and who had thought it fit to pull her 5 school aged kids out of class today to protest the right to opress her reproductive freedom that I was pro-choice.

If you want to convince me to change sides, this is not, I repeat, NOT the way to do so. Don't tell me you love children when you deny the right of an education to your own children so they can be token representatives of your ideals. Don't tell me you love children and feel ok with displaying aborted fetuses. That's like me saying that I'm against the ivory trade that allowed you to have all that exquisite jewelry around your neck and me carrying around a poster of a freshly de-tusked elephant carcass. Doesn't work that way.

What I find mildly ironic is that these are the same people who carry around their Bibles and wear "What Would Jesus Do" t-shirts. I don't remember that many times that Jesus used scare tactics to try to get people to join him. Rather, he showed compassion to people. You know, let them know that someone gives a good goddamn about them? That's how Jesus won the crowd. People who protest like this are no better than the lawyers who sought to kill Jesus because he represented a threat to thier rule. In short, ultra conservatives are the modern day equivilant of the people who killed Jesus.

I had a friend once explain his view on abortion to me as a passing part of some longer conversation. It's been a while back but the basic gist was that if the kid was not wanted, then it would feel nothing but pain and rejection all of its life. There would always be some underlying notion that this kid was a mistake. If the kid can't get unconditional love and understanding at home, then how is he going to learn to express it to people in the outside world. Let's just say it would take several well-positioned miracles for something like that to happen. It might happen for a few, but for the vast majority of these unwanted kids, these kind of opportunites don't happen.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about...

As I said, College Station is a very conservative place. There was no way to tell how the students felt about this issue. I get the sense that a majority agree with it, though. The next generation of gun-toting, SUV driving, war mongering, pious Christian conservative right wingers were just the silent supporters of this threat to their freedom. It amazes me how many folks are silently taking it up the ass and smiling all the time. I think that if they ever heard news to the contrary, that they would probably kill the messenger out of embarrassment of their sheepish error.

Before the 'war' started, people had a new label for French fries, calling them instead Freedom fries in protest of France's stance on the need to go to war in the first place. People were calling the French cowards when it was the French that played a pivotal role in the victory over the British in the Revolutary War, and who also gave us the king's portion of the lower 48 states for an incredible price. So if the prize for cowardice is an independent nation and free land, how much more bountiful is the reward for courage?

It's really unfortunate that all points of view can't be adequately expressed in an environment such as a university campus, but in a way, I think it's cool. It's like a scavenger hunt to find the people you can trust. I've learned over the years that freedom of speech is not a blanket freedom. There are places in this nation where you can speak your mind more freely than others. That's what makes the internet a beautiful thing. If I want to express my views on the tell-tale world of lesbian barbeque sauce contests, I'm free to do so at my leisure. It's a way for us to talk with people of the same opinion who might live thousands of miles away. Now, even that is being limited by the self-rightous. These are the same kind of folks who tell people they can't smoke in a bar in New York. Smoke and bars are just as compatible as bars and drinking. I don't smoke myself, but a bar loses a little bit of it's flavor if you take smoking out of it, especially if someone's smoking a menthol. If you don't like it, you can go down to the liquor store, set up your own house bar and have all your lushy, non-smoking friends join you for a drink after scouring the town for a bar where there wasn't anyone lighting up.

So, I guess this either makes me a patriot that speaks Freedom, or a terrorist that speaks French. Call me what you may, but don't come crying to me when the last of our civil liberties gets swallowed up in the name of safety and xenophobia.