Letter to the Editor 12/9

By Phil DiCicco

published: Wed, 9 Dec, 2009

To the Editor,

I am writing in regards to the article “Board denies funds for anti-abortion group.”
I was present at the Student Government Board meeting on Tuesday night, and let me assure your readers that SGB President-elect Charlie Shull’s rationale is indeed as flawed as it appears in the article.

If Shull has a problem with the religious members of this campus, that’s fine. It’s his opinion. Maybe a nun rapped him on the knuckles back in grade school and he’s still upset about it.

In any case, his reasoning that the March for Life is a “proselytizing” event flies in the face of the fact that it isn’t a religious event by any means, as mentioned by both Students for Life member Justin Romeo and Peter Gruber, the president of the group. Having been to the March for Life in previous years, I can say with certainty that it is not an effort to convert people to a religion but to voice an opinion.

If voicing an opinion is proselytizing, then all political groups at Pitt ought to have their funding revoked. Shull did take the time to mention Romeo’s religious convictions, which weren’t relevant to the topic of funding at all. I think this is evidently a case of Board members’ bias, and it sounds like a violation of the First Amendment, which protects the freedoms everyone is for, until they have to hear something they don’t like.

Sincerely,

Phil DiCicco
School of Information Sciences