It might have been vaguely tragic if it had been a good idea, but the collapse of a bad idea never seems like anything but the work of merciful destiny. The funny thing is that even now that the brouhaha has died away, everyone involved still seems surprised that their plans for a judicious, philosophical discussion about abortion went awry.
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“They’re dedicating everything at our school,” says Kirsten Olson, vice-president of Chicago-Kent’s Women in Law society. “They’re putting a lot of money into PR and really pushing it because Kent wants to be more competitive with the top schools.”
Chicago-Kent even dedicated a public bathroom last May, hanging a plaque designed by Nicole Hollander in a women’s rest room on the third floor of the new building. The plaque commemorated a 1976 protest by female law students against the shortage of women’s bathrooms in the old building on Wacker Drive. In that protest a group of women occupied a men’s bathroom, festooning the walls with lingerie and putting flowering plants in the urinals. The administration capitulated, and the women got their bathroom.
“Most of us in the prochoice community don’t appear with him because of his lack of respect for women, his unconcern for women and women’s lives, his total disregard for them,” Purrington says. She adds that she thinks it’s a waste of time to prepare for a panel when nothing productive will be said.
Dean Matasar says that he cautioned the students that there are extremes on both ends of the political spectrum. “Back when I was going to school, it was thought that you couldn’t have Stokely Carmichael or Angela Davis on a panel,” he points out. “Although you might not want to share a podium with Scheidler, it’s conceivable that he’s a person of conscience.”
Despite chicken-and-egg-style arguments about whose extremism inspired whom, Scheidler’s anecdotes can’t help but place him in grim perspective. It’s the price of passion in America’s current “cultural war”: the two sides are so rigidly unwavering, the tactics so extreme, that the issues themselves fade from view. When all questions of substance are moot, the fiercest debates revolve around style.
