College Republicans Banned From Obama’s Campus Speech
July 25, 2013 by Ben Bullard
A group of College Republicans who held tickets to an on-campus economy speech by President Barack Obama was denied admittance after civilly protesting the President’s fiscal policies in the hours leading up to the event.
According to The College Fix, “security personnel” Wednesday at the University of Central Missouri turned away the students, who were wearing a variety of Republican accessories and/or Tea Party T-shirts, after they put away their protest signs and attempted to join the 2,500 other ticketholders who’d waited hours to hear the President.
Why? Well, the “security personnel” (never named in the article as the Secret Service or campus security) told the students their political views weren’t the problem, but the President’s safety was.
Wait – isn’t that essentially telling them, in totalitarian fashion, that their political views werethe problem?
“It just didn’t make any sense,” said one College Republican official. “A lot of us traveled several hours to watch the speech. We were very disappointed not to be able to attend.”
The College Republicans had joined with others from the State Republican Party for a 60-person protest that, according to the article, consisted of holding signs and talking to people passing through. Their protest was held in a “public speech area” of the campus and was nowhere within sight, or earshot, of the building where Obama delivered the speech, nor of those ticketholders who had already queued up to be let inside. The report indicates that no other groups or individuals who held tickets were scrutinized or turned away in similar fashion.
Obama’s speech Wednesday marked one stop along his newly-launched Nationwide tour to evangelize the President’s economic policy and stump on jobs growth.
I found it hard to fact-check this article, because it appears that none of these journalists covering the story tried to interview the campus police or the Secret Service. The article states that there were 60 protesters, and 10 were denied admission to the event. If all 60 had tickets, as stated, then 50 of the 60 could/did get inside to hear Obama's speech. I would like to know what those 10 people were doing that caused them to become singled out for security reasons. If all they were doing was holding their signs the rest of them and not making threatening speeches about Obama, why were only these 10 individuals denied entry and 50 allowed entry? If somebody were doing serious journalism about this event, they should be trying to answer that question.
ReplyDelete--David