Photo by Lakyn Shepard/Art Editor
A protester stood outside the Hill Student Center last week.
Kameryn Thigpen
Opinion Columnist
[email protected]
As students, we are expected to go to school, join clubs, eat, sleep and graduate. Each one of us have distinct identities and being able to express them is a privilege. If academics is the brain of this campus, then self-expression of our students is the heart and everything in between.
Last week on our campus, there was a man in very close proximity of UAB’s Hill Student Center, the center stage for our expression. A man named Daniel Rusk, a self-proclaimed evangelist who has been around campus sharing his very passionate views about the abomination of the LGTBQ+ community along with the crude behavior of women and their blasphemous deeds regarding abortion. Now, when I was witnessing this, I was nervous at first because I thought he was a danger to the school and we were about to go on lockdown and questioned on why he was not arrested. Then it occurred to me, that he has the constitutional right to exercise his free speech and he did just that.
Although he was shouting trying to get the attention of students, what really got my attention was what happened next. Students began to gather around this radical man talking about the foulness of women twerking and how gay men will go to hell and started to protest themselves. It was an anti-protest of the protest, and I could not believe what I was witnessing.
Students had signs that said many things, but the message was clear that hate will not ever conquer thin and only love was only capable of that. There was another message that was not written on a sign but is was very evident.
The message is that although we are diverse, we are united in what we believe in. In observing this, as a student I was inspired like I had never been before. We became activists in less than ten minutes and we were all different. For once, in this instant, in this peak of time, our race did not matter, our gender or sexuality did not matter. We were united protesting this bigot who dared to step on our campus and tried to slander women and the LGBTQ+ community.
The only thing that mattered in that time is that were UAB students and that this was our home and this man was an intruder in it. After I saw this, I realized that we as students, we do not know our own strength and do not recognize how much power that we have when it comes to these things.
I did know UAB students could protest until that day, I thought it would be unlawful and we would be kicked out UAB for causing a disturbance, but this was not the case. We are stronger than what we think and for anyone who wants to express their views of anything are parallel with hate, UAB will be there to let you know exactly how we feel, and that hate is not welcome here.
