Yesterday, about 60 people--students, mostly, but at least one professor--marched on the Southern Methodist University campus, protesting an editorial that appeared in The Daily Campus last week bearing the headline "Gays, the new Jews?!?" According to this piece in the SMU student newspaper, "Voices silent, mouths gagged with rope — students stood hand-in-hand outside Hughes-Trigg Student Center and on the main quad for two hours Wednesday in a silent protest against intolerance and hate." One student in the march even carried a blown-up copy of the offending editorial, which appeared April 6 and was written by Joel Sartain, a sophomore who claims he's undecided but has clearly made up his mind about one particular subject. To wit:
"Your flamboyancy kills whatever it is you are trying to accomplish. That is your number one problem: flamboyancy. Is it clear? Flamboyancy. When out on the town, what happens when one drinks a little too much? What happens when one drives too fast on the highway? What happens when the child eats too much candy? Overkill kills, Gay Movement. Too much is too much."This seems to be the culmination of something we wrote about in late March, when Spanish lecturer George Henson showed up to work to find that someone had scrawled the word "FAGGOT" across his office door in McFarlin Auditorium. Hensen had written some unkind words about George Dubya in the student paper; next thing he knows, out comes the Sharpie, and two plus two equals the epithet on the door.
Two weeks later--following more editorials, more condemnations and more allegations in The Daily Campus, which, to its credit, appears willing to run most anything--came yesterday's protest. By the way, the whole protest was organized by Harrison Ford, a senior theater major; judging by the pictures, it had major production value, especially for an SMU protest. --Robert Wilonsky
