If you’re anything like me, when you first heard that the feared, hate-mongering, right-wing Milo Yiannopoulos was due to speak on our beloved campus at the invitation of Terps for Trump, the famed Gloria Gaynor lyrics, “At first I was afraid, I was petrified” would have begun playing on repeat in your mind.
You’d imagine the words rattling around and conjuring up images of a terrible scene: a horde of Trump supporters running rampant over campus, tearing birth control off the shelves of the University Health Center and screaming obscenities about women, minorities and immigrants at the top of their lungs from the center of McKeldin Mall before immediately erecting a wall to divide the whole thing in half.
A tad melodramatic, I suppose, but with all of the buffoonery of this presidential race, nothing seems out of the realm of possibility, so forgive my overactive imagination. But, I digress.
My immediate reaction may have been dramatic. But even the more logical, level-headed and reasonable part of me was still against Yiannopoulos coming to this university. Hysterics aside, I was outraged such a diverse school would consider giving a platform to a speaker whose ideas so blatantly discriminated against and disregarded the interests of minorities on the campus. I read about the online petition circling through students at this university trying to block Yiannopoulos from attending. Then, enter my mother via text message:
“Hey Milo is coming to UMD, you gonna go see him just out of curiosity?” she wrote.
“Oh I just read about students trying to block him coming here, they might succeed” I replied.
She quipped, “Oh jiminy… No free speech allowed at a PUBLIC university?”
And, just like that, my mother once again reminded me, in her brazen and challenging way, that sometimes, interests and ideals collide in a boxing ring where only one winner emerges victorious.
Suddenly I was faced with a decision of ethics on both sides: the support of free speech, or the protection of those groups on campus Yiannopoulos so blatantly discriminates and spews hate speech about. The two seemed irreconcilable; it was one or the other. That was until I started thinking about the word my mother had chosen to put in all caps: PUBLIC.
It’s true; we’re a public university. And that means diversity. That means accents and religions, ethnicities and skin colors, genders and disabilities. That also means politics, a spectrum which exists, despite the overwhelming idea that seems to permeate campus that we’re exclusively liberal.
It might be largely unpopular to like Donald Trump or any of his conservative supporters like Yiannopoulos. But don’t those political minorities on campus, like Terps for Trump, deserve the same consideration of free speech that any other minority group would be outraged to have taken from them? Why are politics not subject to the same protections?
And so it is with this that I advocate that nobody demonstrates violently or hatefully when Yiannopoulos makes his appearance on Oct. 26. Voice disapproval, petition, and make your opinions of his views known — those things I advocate for. But instead of trying to strip a campus group (a minority group, even) of their wishes to see a morally questionable speaker, let them have their delusions and instead offer a more palatable and effective form of protest: Vote. Vote. Vote.
Caitlin McCann is a freshman communications major. She can be reached at caitlinmccann32@gmail.com.
