Bianca,

Thanks for the welcome, and for the reply.

I found your post through the links on the April 19 “Shameless Self-Promotion Sunday” at feministe. I’m a regular reader there and occasionally Shamelessly Self-Promote my articles, when they’re relevant.(I listed a couple that week.)

In answer to your question, yes, I was involved in organizing and participating in Tax Day protests (of course, they weren’t called “Tea Parties” until this year) during the late, unlamented Bush administration, most actively when I was living in Auburn, Alabama, with much the same focus and for much the same reasons. (E.g. opposition to my being forced to pay for Mr. Bush’s wars, torture camps, death squad training camps like the School of the Americas, etc.) I was also, for whatever it’s worth, heavily involved in organizing local protests (as a founding member of the Auburn Peace Project) against the Iraq war and occupation, and in organizing protests against a personal appearance by the Warmonger-in-Chief on the Auburn University campus (he was stumping for a local GOP Congressional candidate at the time). Most of my activism these days is focused on opposing all forms of government violence, focusing especially on this government’s wars, the criminalization of immigrants, and police brutality.

Hope this helps explain where I’m coming from.

Viwy,

The Phelpses have been down to Alabama before; they showed up to picket on behalf of Roy Moore (who promptly issued a press release repudiating any association with them), and one of the Phelps brothers sent a long letter to the Plainsman ranting about the feature story they’d run a couple weeks before on the Auburn Gay and Lesbian Association. Based on my past experience with them, I’m pretty sure I know what they’re thinking: that using this poor girl’s death as an occasion to court public hatred will get them and their websites mentioned in the news again. And they’re right; it will.

You know the saying “No publicity is bad publicity?” Well, the Phelpses actually believe it. If there were something even lower than the lowest of the low, they’d rush to be it, as long as it got their names in the paper.

Auburnrules2008,

I surely hope that nobody does anything so stupid as that. The last thing that we need is for a group as despicable as the Phelpses to be dignified as free speech martyrs.

When the Phelpses have picketed funerals of soldiers, AIDS patients, gay-bashing victims, etc., what people have done about it is to gather up a group of supporters to form a disciplined, nonviolent circle around the funeral site in order to protect the mourners from having to see or hear the Phelpses’ vile antics. The Phelpses thrive on courting hatred and provoking reaction; the best way to deal with them is to shield the grieving family and friends, and let the Phelpses do their disgusting little rant-and-rave at nobody in particular.

A young woman is shot to death and her car is gutted and set on fire in a campus parking lot. This is not considered reason enough to conclude there’s enough of an “immediate threat” to the campus community to active AU Alert.

Students find out the next day and start to talk about what happened amongst themselves. These rumors, which may affect the University’s P.R. with parents and alumni, are considered reason enough to conclude that there’s an immediate threat to the campus community to activate AU Alert.

And that right there tells you all that you need to know about the Auburn University senior administration’s attitude towards campus safety and violence against women in the Auburn “campus community.”

-AU graduate, class of ’03