SFL's official response to GAP critics

After a half-dozen Michigan Daily editorials and Letters to the Editor criticizing SFL for bringing the Genocide Awareness Project to campus, now it's our turn!

From the Michigan Daily, 10/7:

In response to the outcry against the Genocide Awareness Project, Students for Life would like to explain our reasons for bringing such a graphic display to the Diag instead of “creating dialogue” in a more peaceful manner.

Over the past few years, we’ve reached out to pro-choice advocates on campus in an attempt to engage in dialogue about the abortion debate. Last spring, we even brought in a pro-life apologist and invited myriad faculty members in women’s studies and philosophy to represent the pro-choice side. We asked every major pro-choice group on campus to come debate us — heck, to come hold a forum with us — but each group refused without even working with us to modify the event to something which both our organizations could agree.

We’ve tabled. We’ve passed out flyers. We’ve brought in speakers. No one would listen, and no one would talk about it — until Monday. Sure, the display inconvenienced you on the way to class, but it forced thousands of students to start thinking about, and even talking about an issue so important to us that we’ll tolerate the hatred of 40,000 people.

Certainly we’d rather stop the 3,300 abortions per day (a conservative number as reported by the Guttmacher Institute) and keep our friends through roundtable discussion, but when we view each abortion as the death of a unique human being, you can understand the urgency of our message. No event held in the Michigan League could have generated as much talk about the subject as the Diag display, so we’ll applaud ourselves for breaking the silence, remind the student body of the resource table we held for pregnant and post-pregnant women and invite any group or any individual out there to engage in some straight talk and real discussion with us.