UNC Community Defends and Decries the Genocide Awareness Project

This letter is in response to the outcry against the presence of the Genocide Awareness Project on campus. Obviously, most everyone agrees that the billboard-sized photographs on display in front of Wilson Library are gruesome, horrific and, in many ways, offensive.

However, the argument I have heard most from disgruntled students (to include a letter to the DTH and a student announcement made before a full lecture class) is that GAP has no right to be at UNC. I take issue with this assertion. Students charge that since they have "no choice" but to look at the photos as they pass, their rights are being infringed upon. My question, then, is how much more of a choice do they have when walking past any of the endless demonstrations on campus?

To choose a similarly controversial issue, are the mock executions (complete with megaphone touting "executors" and stretcher-ladened "victims") put on ever so frequently in the Pit by anti-death penalty groups any less of a rights infringement than the GAP photos? The anti-GAP argument, then, if extended over all areas, would render every demonstration from vehement sweatshop protests to faculty led Thomas Wolfe readings as rights-infringing.

The point, ultimately, is simply that if students truly want UNC to be as progressive as they claim it to be, they must first learn to facilitate the expression of all opinions and not be content with just hearing themselves talk.

Stephen Brower
Junior
English

TO THE EDITOR:

One hardly knows where to begin in exposing the hysterical misinformation masquerading as fact in the four variously wrongheaded and/or vituperative op-ed pieces published in The Daily Tar Heel on March 25 in anticipatory response to the Genocide Awareness Project's exhibit on the UNC campus. Three of the authors identify themselves as members of Feminist Students United. One maintains that she is "pro-women's lives," and one is at least nominally a Catholic. One, Ms. Chupkowski, finds abortion "fabulous."

If there is one thing that sets apart the 1.2 million lives that are annually incinerated in abortuaries across this fruited plain from these facile editorialists and their regimental kindred, it is that the innocent intrauterine lives are without a voice, cannot articulate their vigorous pro-life position and are thus constrained from incorporating into chi-chi, shibboleth-driven "feminist" in-groups.

Instead these lives will be sacrificed as inconvenient, unwanted and disposable, the detritus of a society that cherishes "reproductive rights" (ie., self-centered irresponsibility) over life itself. Jennifer Polley takes offense at the Holocaust analogy. Is not the targeting and extermination of a specific segment of humanity an act of genocide be that segment Jewish, Native American or the unborn?

The P.C. sensibility is agape and aghast at the obvious. What "choice" has the nascent individual in the affair of abortion, ie., the termination of her/his life? Departing from fact as is her wont, Ms. Polley claims the installation's photos are "medically incorrect." These are raw, undoctored photos of aborted children. Face it. Since Ms. Polley has no personal acquaintance with members of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, how can she characterize them as "malicious and extremely cruel?" Rather, I submit that future generations will judge this society's complicit annihilation of over 40 million innocent lives (since the enactment of the grotesque and morally numb Roe v. Wade decision) with horror and repugnance and as "extremely cruel" indeed.

In this vibrant season of the vivid manifestation of nature's renewed glory, with all the profusion of tenderest buds and the most beautiful if fragile first blooms of spring, let us not abdicate our compassionate concern for life, especially for life's most helpless and vulnerable forms.

Richard V. Osha
Processing Assistant
Department of Public Safety

TO THE EDITOR:

I would like to take this opportunity to reply to Mark Harrington's March 27 letter defending the recent GAP display on campus. Mr. Harrington offers the following definition of genocide: "the deliberate and systematic destruction of a national, racial, political, cultural, ethnic, or other group defined by the exterminators as undesirable." Firstly, fetuses are not a defined group. They are not a race, they have no political affiliation, they do not have their own culture. Secondly, and more evidently, abortion is in no way systematic. Abortion doctors do not march up and down the street looking for pregnant victims. To call abortion systematic indicates either a lack of judgment or of respect for the truth.

I do not dispute GAP's right to free speech. From the ubiquitous First Amendment rhetoric coming from GAP apologists, it seems that they are daring the rest of us to suppress them, but this suppression is chimerical. What I do object to is their irresponsible exercise of that right. It seems that GAP has given up on trying to convince others of their correctness through reason and has instead chosen to bypass reason in favor of a blunt emotional appeal. They could have chosen to engage in rational, intelligent debate, but instead they chose to resort to manipulative demagoguery. As a human being with a rational moral sense, I am appalled.

Matt Bonzek
Freshman
Undecided