An open letter to Bloomington Lefties:
As I’m sure you know, [Ann Coulter](http://www.anncoulter.com) will be [speaking at the IU Auditorium](http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/2841.html) on February 23. I have a suspicion that some of you are planning on staging some kind of demonstration which will interrupt her time on stage. I implore you not to do this. There are two reasons I think this would be a bad idea: 1) it won’t do any good, and 2) it will do bad. At the very least, consider what good you hope will be accomplished by such a demonstration.
Do you have a vision of calling out a few words that will leave Ms. Coulter speechless and embarrassed, exposing the vacuity of her arguments? It will not happen. She’s heard it all before, and she’s very comfortable dismissing it. She’s probably already got a come-back line prepared for anything you might say. This woman is no slouch.
Do you just feel the need to let the world know that not everyone at IU agrees with her? Don’t worry, the world knows. If you feel you must express yourself, there are much better ways to tell this to the world. Write about it in your blog or something. :)
Do you have a hope that there will be interesting political debate at this talk? Ridiculous. I mean, first of all, it’s a lecturespeech, it’s not a debate. Who would she debate? You? Interrupting her time with catcalls? Ridiculous. But, even worse, this is a woman who wrote a book called *How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)*. Read it, and you’ll find that the way she recommends talking to a liberal is by making sure they don’t have a chance to talk (she makes the preposterous claim that liberals don’t want to talk in anything more than soundbites… In my experience, most liberals want to overtalk their subject matter… but I digress), by ignoring any compliments that they offer, and making sure that they get angry. And, I mean, the title of her talk (which I, in the great tradition of Dave Barry, must assure you that I am not making up) is with “Liberals Are Wrong About Everything!” (I presume, but do not know, that the exclamation point is included by her). Does this sound like a forum for reasonable debate?
I guess those are about the only reasons I can think of that you might think it would do good. Let’s talk about why it will do bad.
I disagree with Ms. Coulter on the vast majority of subjects, but there are quite a few things about which we agree. One of them is that interrupting someone’s well-deserved time on stage is rude. Now, there may be times when being rude is called for, but this is not one of them. Ms. Coulter is a well-known author and political thinker (yes, that’s right, she *is* a political thinker) and there is absolutely no reason that she shouldn’t be welcomed to speak at any university.
Ms. Coulter is also extremely skilled at rallying support for her cause by demonizing people who are rude to conservatives. So, just stay out of the trap. Stage a demonstration and I bet you anything that after you are escorted away by security, the Auditorium will rockin’ loud with first-pumping conservatives, feeling justifiably pleased that Ms. Coulter was allowed to continue. But it won’t stop there. Ms. Coulter will simply add the experience to a long list of examples she has of why Liberals are all bad. The fact that this would be using your actions to inappropriately represent everyone in the Democratic party and politically left of them will not slow her down one bit. She’s a master of this. (After listening to the first couple of chapters of *How to Talk to a Liberal (if you must)*, I noticed I was starting to feel guilty about my affair with Monica Lewinsky. “Oh, right! That wasn’t me!”)
I could go on, but hopefully you get the point. Now, some of you might feel like you should attend to be exposed to different ideas. I sympathize with that, and perhaps you should. This is part of what led me to [listen to one of her books](http://davidernst.net/blog/2005/10/31/an-ann-coultermichael-moore-experience/) on tape. You might want to save some time and just read a few items off of her [website](http://www.anncoulter.com). But if you do go, don’t expect it to be anything other than what it will. She is vitriolic. She is the epitome of liberal bashing. She has no compunction about it. Be prepared to be hit with an onslaught of insults for believing what you believe, and set your sites no higher than to hope to weed through all of that to actually hear some of the reason behind her beliefs. Yes, she has reasons, and some of them even make some sense to me. I just wish that she would talk about them without being so insulting. But hey, she wouldn’t sell nearly as many books that way, would she?
If you really feel you must protest, I recommend simply standing outside the auditorium with signs that say something like “We welcome Ann Coulter even though we disagree with her” and pass out leaflets with well-reasoned arguments against her positions along with links to her website and some of your choosing. But really, I recommend just not going. You’re not going to convince conservatives or even moderates or undecideds to believe what you believe by interrupting her talk. The idea that you might succeed at that makes about as much sense as thinking that the we will discourage Anti-American sentiments and behaviors in Muslims by attacking Islamic countries with the US military.
P.S. After formulating most of this blog post in my head, I happened across [this columnist’s take on the same thing](http://www.idsnews.com/news/story.php?adid=search&id=33809) in the IDS. Our reasoning is not the same, but the result is: Just don’t go.