Dr. Alexander F. C. Webster, a professorial lecturer in the University Honors Program, argues that Student Judicial Services needs to be more open about outcomes, especially in cases as controversial as the desecration of the crosses by a member of the College Democrats.
“Designed in part to protect students who may be accused falsely, the usual inconclusive conclusion of the so-called student judicial process in this case succeeds only in unjustly protecting the indisputably guilty.”
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AMEN, AMEN, AMEN! I’m glad somebody else on this campus agrees with me about this. As a Christian I was deeply offended by the desecration…and so disillusioned by the GW population when there was hardly any public outrage. Disgusting.
Why is the destruction of some property worse than the destruction of other property? We go to a religiously neutral school and live in a religiously neutral country.
Legally the destruction is property is categorized according to the monetary value of the property. In this case, that was miniscule as a handful out of thousands of crosses were destroyed. The damage was probably not greater than $5.00. This is a civil offense.
Should it be more severe because its your religion? Would you feel the same way if a Scientology relic were destroyed? Or a Wiccan shroud? We either need to judge crimes based on neutral secular criteria or give added weight to the destruction of all religious property… unfortunately the latter is infinitely recursive.
Even as a Jew, I feel utterly disgusted that there was not a larger outcry against the desecration of the crosses. The damages transcend that of monetary value, but rather display a level of hate so great as to warrant such horrible actions.
It’s significantly less hateful than the imagery used by abortion protesters all the time. And frankly, that imagery is OK — freedom of speech and expression extends to saying “hateful” things. But you can’t speak out against hate when it’s directed at you but not when it’s being perpetrated by those you agree with (e.g. anti-abortion protesters telling people they are murderers and will go to hell outside clinics).
So it’s not GW’s role to punish the hate. Rather it’s GW’s role to protect the property of private individuals. But again, the destruction of that property needs to be judged based on secular objective characteristics of the destroyed property rather than the speech behind the act.
Mark, the great failure of secular-egalitarianism is that its logic is reductionist. The end of the reduction is that nothing has any intrinsic value. In the end, being itself is logically non-existent. We are only $5.00 worth of stuff which will soon enough sucumb to the forces of entropy and cease to exist.
The testimony of the Cross is that the intrinsic value of human life is so great that God Himself condescended to become one of us and die voluntarily for us for no other reason than love. By that act of love the door to eternity is opened to us. With the following Resurrection, death itself (entropy) is not only temporarily suspended, but completely abolished. No other religious symbol makes the same testimony. Not one.
When the Cross is descrated, life itself is descrated. That is an ontological fact that is true whether one believes it or not. Such desecration and the mentality behind it opens the door to all sorts of horrors as even a cursory examination of the history of the 20th century reveals.
Whether you walk the path of life or of death is your choice. I just wanted to point out to you why you might want to at least consider that some things are actually worth more than others.
I am a very elder citizen of the world and have seen great desecratrions of symbols of all religions in my 86 years of life. In all such actions I have observed that they are perpetrated by people burning with hatred – a hatred that ultimately results in great harm to others. The students who did that action merely had to complain to the GWU officials or write a letter to the Hatchet explaining their feelings. But to wantonly destroy symbols sacred to others is the ultimate expression of fear of, and shame for, discovery of their hatred. So are the commentators who wish to be identified by a non-commital first name. – I am a graduate of your university.