Opinion: This Is Not About Abortion

Last week, the Del Norte Students for Life club posted a promotion for Club Rush. Their post was immediately swamped with comments, some of them incredibly hostile. Then someone started a petition on change.org calling for the removal of that club from Del Norte. Within about twelve hours of being posted, it had more than seven hundred signatures. To put it in other words: a club existed that advocated for ideas and policies that many other students disagreed with. Instead of expressing why they support different ideas and policies or taking action to advance said different ideas and policies, many students reacted with extremely aggressive comments and attempted to wipe the objectionable club off the map. This drama prompts two questions, one practical and the other a matter of principle. One, should DNSL or any similarly controversial club be allowed to exist as an ASB-sanctioned club? Two, if so, should students respect their peers’ rights to organize and advocate for their beliefs?

Yes, to both.

To forestall any objection to my thoughts based on political disagreement, I would like to explicitly state that this article is not about abortion. It’s about student freedom of expression and advocacy. My personal views on abortion are irrelevant, though I will say that I am not a member of Del Norte Students for Life and have absolutely no intention of becoming one.

There’s no legitimate reason to say that DNSL isn’t allowed to be a club under current rules. The Equal Access Act, explained by the Anti-Defamation League in this article, “requires public secondary schools which meet certain criteria to treat all student-initiated groups equally, regardless of the religious, political, philosophical or other orientation of the groups.” Non-curriculum groups, like the jewelry-making club, mock trial club, etc., are all required to be treated the same. If the jewelry-making club is allowed to post promotions on Instagram for Club Rush, so is DNSL. According to the ADL, schools are only allowed to “prohibit clubs and organizations that are contrary to the educational mission of the school or present a danger to the health and safety of a school”—not clubs whose message the community disagrees with, even if they disagree passionately.

Several students apparently believe that their problems with DNSL exceed mere ideological disagreement and have implied that the club presents an immediate threat to their rights and feelings of safety. I attempted to reach the individual who started the petition for comment, but as of this writing I still don’t know who it is. The entire text of the petition to ban DNSL from Del Norte reads: “Abortion is a human right and a basic right. No person with a uterus should have the right to terminate their pregnancy taken away from them. This club supports taking away that right. They must be stopped. #Womensrights.” There is no mention of how DNSL poses an immediate concrete threat to the student body, merely the implication that their abstract ideological support of an issue is dangerous. Some of us have conflated supporting an idea that we find harmful with actively harming others. We’d be having quite a different conversation if we were talking about pro-life students kidnapping another student to prevent an abortion.  

But we aren’t talking about that. We’re talking about a club with a message that some students passionately disagree with, but that hasn’t actually done anything objectionable based on the criteria outlined in the EAA. According to the DNSL president, the club’s activities include bimonthly meetings, listening to presentations, and participating in events in the community related to their cause. None of these activities violates the rules laid out in the EAA.

The logic behind those EAA rules rests on an appreciation for the importance of freedom of opinion, an appreciation that some of us lack. I am reminded of a piece entitled “The Indispensable Opposition,” written in 1939 while the world was falling apart. In it, Walter Lippmann tried to remind his audience of how important freedom of opinion is because he noticed that their reasons for supporting it were hazy and fallible. They were failing to recognize its practical and invaluable benefits, rendering them vulnerable to becoming apathetic towards others’ freedom of opinion. But I must note a key difference between Lippmann’s audience and my own. Lippmann lived in a world in which freedom of opinion was apparently jeopardized for lack of awareness of how important it is. We live in a world in which, as is the case with the student petition, some people openly suppress opinions in the name of justice. Because of an inability to distinguish opinion from action, the abstract from the concrete, they mistake contradictory ideas for bullets fired in their direction. We seem to have already forgotten exactly why freedom of opinion and the skills that complement it—the ability to truly listen to others’ beliefs and to articulate your own—are indispensable to any society. (So, in order to remember, go read Lippmann’s article. It’s linked above, costs nothing, and isn’t too long.)

Slight spoiler for Lippmann’s article: parallel to the importance of freedom of opinion is the necessity of interacting with different opinions. I’d be remiss if I failed to address that some people find not only the DNSL but all clubs dealing with political or otherwise controversial issues inappropriate for school. Some suggested that our learning environment should be free of any potentially offensive ideas and that we must focus on “unbiased education.” Such a suggestion is wildly unfeasible, since it amounts to a flagrant violation of EAA rules. But there is more than a practical reason that schools shouldn’t stifle exploring and advocating for ideas that make some people uncomfortable on campus. School, especially high school, should not be an extension of the sheltered bubble in which so many of us grew up. We have to learn at some point how to participate in serious discussion and advocate for what we believe in, don’t we? Why not now, when we’re still learning everything else? Why wait? Why not check those critical thinking skills that we were supposed to have acquired? Are we to insulate ourselves from conflict for the rest of our lives? Shall we censor our curriculum to remove any and all ideas that “make people uncomfortable?”

High school should be a safe place to begin testing the waters of new ideas, to push our ideological boundaries and broaden our intellectual horizons under the loose supervision of teachers who can ask us questions to steer us from fallacy and curb our nastier impulses. Can anyone honestly imagine that a face-to-face conversation in a classroom would have reached the same level of hostility (and unproductivity) as those Instagram comments? Can anyone imagine how much worse it might have been if students expressing extreme disagreement had only the proprietors of the group advocating those ideas to express that disagreement to, instead of the school administration? Where would we have ended up if there was no one to pull the brakes on this runaway train, no authority figure to remind us of how important it is to respect other people’s opinions? 

Speaking of, I recognize that there is something of a paradox inherent in respecting other people’s opinions. If opinions counter to yours aren’t “wrong,” then how can yours be right? How can you justify believing what you believe? But this binary perspective ignores the complexity behind people’s opinions and ideologies. Supporting legal abortion or not isn’t choosing between respecting women’s autonomy and taking it away. Nor is it a choice between protecting or not protecting fetuses. There is a vast array of factors and hierarchies of priorities underlying each individual’s choice to support or oppose legal abortion and make decisions on countless other complex issues. If you were to adopt the premises and values of someone who disagreed with you, chances are your logic would lead you to a different conclusion than what you already believe in. In essence, respecting other people’s opinions is respecting that they have their own perspectives shaped by their own unique backgrounds and experiences. It’s respecting their right to be different.

Difference, of course, leads to tension. But we transcend our differences. The mere fact of being human makes us all more similar than different. Only in remembering each other’s humanity can we effectively cope with that tension, not in absolving ourselves of our responsibility to manage it by burying those unlike us so deep below ground that they never see daylight. Not only is that impossible, it’s also cowardly and despotic. In the gladiatorial arena of public and political discourse, you cannot shoot your opponents in the back and drag them out of the ring. You cannot lock them in the dungeons or feed them to the lions and pretend that they don’t exist. You have to face them head on. If your argument is the stronger one, it should win. If not, fear not—for good or bad, there is no cap on how many times you can fight for your point.

And fight you must—but not literally, of course. If you want to advance your ideas, argue logically and with principle. Spewing vitriol doesn’t win debates. I can call people stupid a thousand times over, but until I actually explain why I disagree with them, they’ll have no motivation to reconsider how they think or respect my thoughts. There are infinitely more effective (and less destructive) alternatives to insulting or erasing those with whom you disagree. To the pro-choice students out there who feel passionately about this issue: you could organize a pro-choice club to counter the pro-life club. (Perhaps it could escort women into Planned Parenthood, past anti-abortion activists on the sidewalk.) You could ask for a debate—though, if the Instagram comments on that post were any indication, this is too charged an issue to debate coherently. You could even write an opinion for a student publication like the Talon. There are several options for facing your opponent head-on instead of cursing at them, silencing them, and trying to lock their ideas away in a cold, dark corner of public discourse where you won’t have to see them. Because let us not forget, ideas don’t disappear just because someone finds them offensive.

All of that being said, people on both sides of abortion and other serious issues have to recognize that their opinions are more than just words. They’re beliefs and intentions that, when you articulate them, ripple far beyond your tiny, insulated corner of the world’s pond. When we talk about grave matters, some people forget that such matters are more than intangible ideological debates. They’re people’s lives. Your words could help someone, or scar them for life. When you crusade around acting like you are “right,” momentarily inserting yourself and your judgment into other people’s lives, “the other side” doesn’t suffer for it. It’s the people whose lives you’ve intruded upon who bear the potentially lifelong burden of your opinion. You have the incredible gift that is the right to freedom of opinion. Don’t forget the momentous responsibility that accompanies it.