Daryl wrote:Right? So they did it first, still very strange to me.
What school would send their teenaged male students out to protest in public, over an issue that only should involve adult women, and is nothing to do with them?
As I said a different universe.
That would be because you've bought into the idea that free speech can somehow be restricted by gender. Going along the slippery slope, we get free speech being restricted by an upper age limit, a lower age limit, education ... colour.
I'm not a Roman Catholic, but I do know why they think the way they do on abortion. Essentially, it's based on the idea that life begins with the zygote. A zygote doesn't have the same genetics as its mother, so those different genetics make it a separate being and so it should have legal protection as a separate being.
The pro-choice movement would argue that any zygote, embryo or foetus which can't survive outside the maternal life-support system
isn't yet a separate being and doesn't deserve those legal protections. It's still part of the mother's body, and the mother has sole control over it.
We're not talking science, here. Nobody is disagreeing about science. It's a moral/ethical question about the point at which a fertilised egg grows into a being with legal protection.
And if we say that our ability to talk on moral/ethical questions are gender-based, we might as well give up and go home because 'free speech' just died.
From the point of view of the school, taking the kids to the protest would normally have the following advantages.
1. They learn that they live in a free country, where it is possible for citizens to peacefully protest against the law of the land.
2. They learn that it's okay in the US to have a view that's different from other people's.
3. [From the school's point of view] - the parents and teachers are unlikely to object to this particular protest, because Catholics generally *are* pro-life. It's much 'safer' than a Republican or Democratic rally.
Unfortunately, this particular year they learnt that the idea of 'peaceful protest' and it being okay to hold 'different views' appears to be dying. And it is, apparently, okay for a bunch of kids on a field trip to be told that they deserve to be punched, deserve to be killed, shouldn't have dared to be on the march at all because they have no right to speak on such matters, and that they deserve to have their school so concerned about their safety that they have to close it down.
And I still can't find out what they actually did wrong - apart from look at someone funny.