heckling
so some congressman heckled the president last night during his speech. health care reform is outside of the scope of this blog post (look elsewhere for plenty of commentary and debate), i want to comment quickly about this heckling and other protests that have occurred recently.
two years ago, i took part in protesting dick cheney’s speaking appearance at byu’s commencement ceremonies (some commentary on the topic can be found here). there was a huge amount of uproar and debate on campus then, and honestly i think that debate (despite the fact that i still don’t believe cheney should have been invited) was one of the best things to happen to byu in a long time.
now two years later with a democrat in office, i really wish i would have written down some of the things that i was told from people supportive of cheney. i would love to be able to ask them why the double standard. just for now, let’s set aside the differences between lying in order to enter an unjust war and increasing the national deficit. and also lets set aside the differences between authorizing illegal torture techniques and supporting a public health insurance option. lets pretend that the things people were upset with cheney about are on the same level as the things people are upset with obama about. given that level playing field, let’s talk about protesting: i support it. it’s a constitutional right and despite it not always being efficacious, i think it plays an important role in a democratic society for letting the voice of the people be heard.
despite how many times i was told the contrary by byu college republicans, protesting against the policies of a political leader is not “disrespecting the office.” i bet that i could get 99% agreement from the college republicans on this subject now that a democrat is in the office. on the day of dick cheney’s speech, we held a peace protest on campus. no signs were allowed to be directed at dick cheney himself, they all were positive messages supporting peace and the end of war. we got called all sorts of things from the people driving by (as i discussed here). would those same people be saying the same things to current protestors such as these:
(some of the people in that video actually remind me of the people yelling at us peace protestors.)
like i said, i support those people’s right to protest. however, its hard for me not to contrast our silent protest against cheney and our positive peace protest with some of the people we have been seeing on the news. bringing guns to protest? seriously? remember folks, just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
the people who organized the protests against cheney urged everyone who went to the speech to not disrupt or heckle, but to just listen respectfully. contrast that with the idiot who yelled out something about gadianton robbers at the end of harry reid’s forum speech at byu in fall 2007. and of course, contrast that with the idiot congressman who yelled you “you lie!” during obama’s speech last night (actually obama wasn’t lying). what happened to respecting the office? and i will end on a humorous look at this silliness from this modern world:
