Attempting to position themselves as an embattled minority, members of the University of Maine College Republicans have been posting bigoted content and daring members of the university community to challenge them on their First Amendment rights.
The UMaine College Republicans declared on Facebook last week that “[b]oth anti-white racism and heterophobia are an epidemic on campus.”
“You can not be pro white or be proud of the fact you are straight. You will have thousands of people try to get you banned over and over again,” read the post, which was published Friday.
“The UMaine College Republicans will always stand up against the Feminist outrage machine,” it continued, singling out the university’s Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, saying that money going to that department should be used “to start more Trade School programs.”
Three days earlier on June 4, the conservative group angered the college community when it posted a “Straight Pride” meme of white, a heterosexual couple getting married and wrote, “Happy pride month!.”
Calls for “Straight Pride” as a way of deriding the national celebration of LGBTQ rights drew widespread condemnation earlier this month when a group in Boston said it was organizing a parade using that slogan.
On June 5, the college group’s vice president, Jeremiah Childs, defended the post in a Facebook live-stream.
“You are not going to intimidate us. You are not going to bully us. You are not going to shut us down. You can go ahead and try but it’s not going to work,” he said. “As I like to tell my fellow conservatives, you are going to face a lot of opposition for who you are and what you believe[…] We are an actual marginalized community on campus. We are a minority.”
The UMaine College Republicans also made waves last December when they threw “an American & Mexican styled Christmas party” called “Deck the Walls” in support of President Donald Trump’s border wall.
“We are going to grow larger,” Childs continued. “We are going to grow bigger, and all this hatred of our group is going to help us.”
Because the 2016 Republican Party platform fails to recognize marriage equality, Childs said the group is “well within our bounds and well within our rights as Republicans to post a Straight Pride meme.”
Associate Professor of Higher Education Susan Gardner, who serves as the director of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maine, said that the students running the group’s social media accounts were “looking for negative attention.”
“I think their tactics are very much in line with what’s going on in our larger society,” she told Beacon. “It’s about getting likes and re-blogs and re-tweets and heart symbols.” Gardner said the students “are performing the same kind of behaviors they are seeing politicians perform.”
“It’s not about really thinking through policy, it’s not really thinking through the best way to help people. It’s about sound bites and tweets and I think this is not a terribly helpful way for our country to move forward, period.”
It has become a tactic of conservatives in recent years to treat college campuses like battlegrounds, attempting to provoke moderate and progressive students and professors with extreme speakers and rhetoric, and then falling back on the claim that their rights are being violated when met with condemnation.
Clearly hoping for an escalation, Waterville mayor and state GOP vice chair Nick Isgro, who himself has a history of sharing racist and alt-right rhetoric online, commented on the UMaine College Republican page that if they are having their club status threatened that he will come up to campus for a rally. “If they hate our culture that much at a public university, they need to be challenged,” he wrote.
As for the impact of the rhetoric, Gardner pointed out that while these kinds of statements are within the bounds of the First Amendment, there’s “a difference between free speech and responsible speech.”
“I think it does contribute to a really negative climate for our students who belong to these different populations,” Gardner said.
“I’ve heard [the college Republicans] say that they feel they are marginalized, that they are discriminated against, that they don’t always feel safe voicing opinions in classrooms and on campus and I think the irony there is interesting,” she continued. “At the same time they are putting out language that reflects the larger society where a lot of folks who are trans, queer, students of color, are not in the majority, they feel that way all the time, not just on campus.”
“There’s a piece there not being internalized,” Gardner added. “If you feel this way — marginalized, discriminated against — they are not seeing how their actions contribute to other people feeling that way.”
Photo via UMaine College Republican Facebook Page
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