Contain your anger at the zygote for a moment, if you can, and listen to the facts. Those outside libertarians would be FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), a national org that aims to “defend and sustain individual rights at America’s colleges and universities” and to “protect the unprotected [...heh] and to educate the public and communities of concerned Americans about the threats to these rights on our campuses and about the means to preserve them.”

So what brought these dudes’ gaze to Cornell? I’d say Elena the Unborn Fetus invited them, but that would be gauche. (Like the signs themselves? Cringe.) Suffice it to say that there was a wee little debacle when, on the morning of Oct 22, an administrative assistant named Dawn Warren confiscated the Cornell Coalition for Life’s “Elena” signs on the Engineering Quad a mere hour after they had been put up. The Coalition for Life had gone through all the necessary Big Red tape to post these signs and even posted their approval form on the back of the first sign in the series, but Warren, who thought the display “inappropriate” on sight, removed them anyway. The kicker: after a member of the group argued with the assistant and her boss — who claimed there was an “unwritten policy” that prevented sign-postings not related to Engineering — the Cornell Police had to be called in to reinstall the signs.

Since FIRE got wind [heh?] of the debacle, the principled group has taken on the pro-lifers’ cause as just another smelly example of “the stench of disdain for expressive rights on the Cornell campus” and publicized it: it’s mentioned in a UWIRE story, Politico has the Daily Sun’s report up, as does the liberal site the New Republic. Just you wait — Ann Coulter will definitely be gay pregnant with this shit if it proves, um, fertile.

What really incenses FIRE is not the fact that pro-lifers were given a voice but the fact that Cornell admins dealt with the situation so poorly. In a statement to the entire Cornell community, Tommy Bruce, the University’s PR flack, played it off as an “honest mistake.” Dean of Engineering (the Provost-elect who might be pro-life!) Kent Fuchs apologized for the embarrassing incident and vowed to “clarify our official policy and how it will be enforced.” Misrepresenting what happened as damage control, it seems, will only make FIRE more intent on cataloging this particular incident among the administrative censure that they perceive as so pervasive in higher education. In a rousing email to their troops, they listed the Cornell instance among a similar incident at Missouri State University as an “ominous threat to liberty”:

You may be wondering how administrators at MSU and Cornell responded to these instances of censorship. They did nothing. By failing to act, they are promoting a “heckler’s veto,” which gives the least tolerant members of the college community the power to control the flow of discourse. Even worse, by failing to correct this type of censorship, they are promoting a dangerous misapprehension among their campus communities—that the First Amendment somehow grants individuals the right to destroy the expression of others as a means of exercising their own freedom of expression. With administrators unwilling to stop this vigilante censorship, *FIRE needs your help now more than ever in our fight to protect freedom of expression.*

What nobody has stopped to do is examine why the content of the signs is offensive *besides the fact that they’re pro-life.* I think it’s because the concept is straight-up tasteless. What offends my sensibilities, to be clear, is not the images of the fetus but the clumsy captions next to them. I am all for this beauty of life shit when it’s on the Discovery Channel with epic panning around the fetus and David Attenborough narrating in that amazing British accent of his. Were I a woman, these images would probably make me tell myself I would never get an abortion. (Even as a man, I lie to myself all too often.) But the captions, which put infantile phrases in the half-developed mouth of an “unborn child,” are tragically unconvincing (and comically entertaining) to anyone above the age of 6, let alone well-educated college students.

And as for all wrong things at Cornell, we have Harvard to blame for “Elena.” A 2006 Harvard Crimson Magazine article said the campaign actually worked, insofar as sparking debate on the issue was the goal:

The Crimson began running Op-ed pieces on abortion—inspiring several students and alumni to respond via letters—Students for Choice (SFC) reorganized and brought in new leadership, and a group of students from both the pro-life and pro-choice sides recently established the Abortion Policy Group Study at the IOP, whose findings are soon to be published. But as the on-campus debate slowly began, the “poster child” for abortion suddenly disappeared.

Good for you, Harvard. But that doesn’t appear to be the case here, where our admins think they have to take care of everything for us. There haven’t been any editorials published in the Sun and those paying any attention at all are talking about how Cornell admins totally shat on the pro-lifers’ message, not the message itself. Pictures of the entire series of signs below.