There was an anti-abortion display set up at the parade grounds of Louisiana State University last weekend to commemorate Roe vs Wade. Predictably, this made a lot of people unhappy, and some of them were stupid about it. Over the weekend, 3,000 out of the 4,000 painted crosses that had been planted there were stolen or destroyed. Predictably, this made the people who set up this display (the "Students for Life" group and the St. Mary and St. Joseph Family Memorial Foundation) very upset, and now they're trying to call this a "hate crime" (which some bloggers are repeating and emphasizing) and threatening to sue the police for not "taking it seriously enough", presumably because they failed to immediately arrest and throw the book at five people a police officer saw removing crosses. (The officer in question did note who they were and directed them to leave immediately, and a full investigation is still ongoing.)

Okay, time out folks. Both sides.

I'll start with the anti-abortion folks, since I'm usually annoyed with them anyway. This isn't a hate crime, and it's not about your religion. The pro-choice people get unhappy when you do things like this because from their perspective, you're not pro-life, you're pro-death of grown women, for the sake of protecting a few cells without two neurons to click together that aren't independent, living human beings under any biological definition (I know you disagree, but I'm trying to get you to see what it looks like from the other side for a moment). I suspect a lot of the anti-abortion crowd has never read up on what life was like before Roe vs Wade, and exactly what it is they're trying to go back to. I recommend reading this for a start (thanks to feministing for bringing it to my attention). And that wonderful ideal that you can always give up a child for adoption and there are always people willing to adopt? I'm afraid that's only true if the baby is white. You may disagree. That's fine. The important thing is to realize that there are people who have good reasons to believe differently.

A lot of pro-choice people are Christian. Some of them, bless their confused souls, are even Catholic. The fact that someone disagrees with you about what constitutes being a human individual doesn't mean that he or she hates God, the Church, you, or your pet dog. Now, being vandalized to the tune of $9,000, and worse, having all the time and effort you put into a display being lost is certainly no small matter, but you don't help things by getting hysterical about it, making unsupportable claims, and attacking the only people who can help you: the police. You see, the police are somewhat constrained in this matter by some very important things: due process, evidence, and the the presumption of innocence until guilt is proven. Don't tamper with this; you'll miss it if it goes away and you're the one dragged up before the screaming mob. If you think the police aren't investigating properly, you'll need to come up with something better than the fact that they haven't yet burned a scapegoat — and if you find it, that's what you need to trumpet. Hard facts and evidence; the police have to use them, and so do you.

I'll leave you with one last bit of unasked-for advice: you're going about this all wrong, anyway. This entire fight isn't about whether God is great, or whether it's okay to kill children, much as the right-wing demagogues would like to paint it as such; it is about whether or not an embryo is a child, whether a woman should be forced to endanger herself and deliver an unwanted, unloved baby into the world, and whether or not the baby can then be supported. If you want to convert the pro-choice crowd, don't plant crosses, study science or fix the adoption system. Convince me that the cluster of cells at 60 days is capable of independent thought, and that there will always be someone willing to take care of it if it is born, and I will probably change sides. The crosses just make me roll my eyes. Hard facts. Evidence. You can't convince me something is true just by jumping up and down and repeating it over and over.

If you can keep to the facts and keep the vitriol down, you might also want to try setting up a table with handouts about what happened, and take up a collection. I think you might be surprised at what kind of donations you would receive from both sides.

Now on to the vandals.

I hope you people (and I unfortunately don't believe that there were only five of you that were this childish) realize by now that you are in exactly the same category as the nitwits who vandalize Planned Parenthood clinics. I know that a lot of you think that anti-abortionists are in the same category as the zygotes they protect (without two neurons to knock together), but amazing as it might be, a lot of the anti-abortion crowd consists of reasonably intelligent people that just happen to believe (for reasons of religious indoctrination or otherwise) that they're trying to stop the killing of human beings. If nothing else, you should be giving them respect for having the initiative to make a protest about their beliefs and having the courage to stand by them and sign their names to it — unlike you sneak-in-the-night vandal cowards. If you're going to make a counter-protest out of this, stand up and be counted — and be arrested for it if you feel so strongly that you have to tear something down. That's the price of legitimacy for civil disobedience, that you not hide from what you've done.

The funny thing is, in the very complaints about things that have happened in the past there were good examples of the kinds of things you might have done without having stooped to such a level: coat-hangers left on the ground in front of the crosses, for instance. If you'd had the gumption to buy 4,000 coathangers and placed one in front of each cross with a dash of blood-red paint across the hook and the ground, you would have created a spectacularly evocative counter-display without losing the moral high ground or breaking any laws (and for the right-wingers burning with righteous fury over this, ask yourselves honestly if you'd be just as upset for the principle if this had happened and anti-abortionists had come by and stolen the coat hangers).

But you didn't. As a group, you've stolen or destroyed $9,000 worth of church property, associated the pro-choice movement with vandals and thieves, and convinced the anti-abortion crowd of nothing... or at least nothing useful. I'll offer you some unasked-for advice, too: if you want to change the minds of the anti-abortion people, put together the science on when embryos become viable, health risks to women, the bloody history of life before Roe vs. Wade, and the real truth about what happens to unwanted babies (particularly ones that aren't white), and spend the time passing that information around. Hard facts and evidence apply to you too.

As for what you actually did, however, I hope that those involved come forward on their own to make amends, and if not, that the judge throws the book at the five that were caught — not just for vandalism, but for gross stupidity.