College Students Rip Down Pro-Life Flyers, Then Brag on Twitter
A group of students at American University labeling themselves the “AU Justice League” have taken credit for ripping down anti-abortion flyers on campus.
The campus’s College Republicans put the flyers up Wednesday night, and called for the defunding of Planned Parenthood. But by Thursday morning, the vast majority of the flyers had disappeared.
It didn’t take long to figure out why. At 12:30 a.m., the Twitter account @AUJusticeLeague tweeted a photo of dozens of crumpled-up flyers with the caption “We had some fun with the college republican posters tonight. Let us know if we missed any guys!”
The incident was first reported by Campus Reform, showing a picture of the Justice League’s tweet before it was deleted. AU has no official group called the AU Justice League, and the Twitter account itself was very recently created, so it’s currently unclear who’s responsible for ripping the flyers down, or how many people were involved.
The Justice League account engaged in brief Twitter spats with critics Thursday but by mid-afternoon, the account was deleted.
Sam Shumate, the vice president of the AU College Republicans, said the removal appeared to have been quite thorough.
“I’ve walked around campus, and they got just about all of them,” Shumate told Campus Reform. “I didn’t see any.”
Ironically, just two weeks ago, AU’s faculty senate unanimously passed a resolution condemning the use of “trigger warnings” and emphasizing the important of freely exchanging ideas on university campuses.
Attacks on anti-abortion displays at colleges are not uncommon. Last year at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a professor was arrested after she seized an anti-abortion display from a protester and then destroyed it. In 2012 at Dartmouth College, a “Cemetery of the Innocents” protest that used American flags to represent the number of abortions since 1973, was run over by a car. In 2006, a professor at Northern Kentucky University urged her students to use their “express their freedom-of-speech rights” by destroying an anti-abortion display, and then led them in doing exactly that.
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