A friend e-mailed this article to me today and asked what I thought of it:
Last week, the University of Victoria Students’ Society finally ruled that a pro-life club broke the school’s harassment policy by comparing abortion to the Holocaust in October 2010.
At a Feb. 7 meeting, the students’ society voted to censure Youth Protecting Youth over “Echoes of the Holocaust,” a talk led by a visiting representative of the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform. The public disapproval of YPY’s actions follows recommendations made by the students’ society’s complaints committee, which was formed in 2008 after numerous students voiced concerns regarding the controversial club.
Simply put, I think that the university needs to educate itself on the definition of “harassment” and “holocaust”. According to the dictionary widget thing on my computer, to harass is to subject to aggressive pressure or intimidation and holocaust is destruction or slaughter on a mass scale. Since the event was held in a classroom, I’m not sure how anybody could possibly feel harassed, since in order to encounter it one would have to essentially bring it upon themselves and attend the event. I feel pretty safe in saying that abortion easily fits the definition of a holocaust.
Of course, the end of the article gives away the real reason people were complaining:
The complaints committee also recommended the UVSS board weigh mediation options with YPY and host a restorative justice (likely pro-choice) event, organized by the Political Action Committee.
Maybe it’s just me, but if I wanted to do a follow-up restorative justice event, it would be about the holocaust, not abortion. It looks like just another excuse to attack the pro-life club (business as usual).
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Andrea adds: I do see what you are saying Deborah, and I do think this is just another example of open season on pro-life beliefs. That said, I think holocaust is a term that should be reserved for The Holocaust. It’s a word that was created uniquely for that, if I’m not mistaken. I support the Centre for Bio-ethical Reform, but in some ways, I wish they’d leave the term “Holocaust” out and go with “mass slaughter” or “genocide” to describe abortion. I think my feelings on this may deserve a whole post. But in the interim, I’d say you are absolutely right: no one was harrassed by the presentation and this is just an excuse to make pro-lifers on campus shut up.
by 
Andrea:
The title of the talk/presentation was “Echoes of the Holocaust”, so I think your objection was addressed.
I agree with Andrea. CCBR should use a different term than holocaust. After all, their talk has been shut down in several campuses now because of that word alone, so why would they continue to use it? it defeats their purpose of trying to talk to people; instead they just get backs up by sticking to that language. So the fight then becomes about words, rather than the issue of abortion.
At the risk of continuing the fight about words, the word was not created just to describe the Nazi mass murders; it was co-opted by for that purpose by adding the word “the” in front of it. The word itself dates back to the middle ages at least, and the dictionary gives as its first definition “a case of large-scale destruction, especially by fire”. Admittedly it certainly fits what the Nazis did, but the word was not created for that purpose. I agree that it probably causes more harm than good to use it in this case, but the pro-abortion movement would also take issue with terms like genocide or mass-murder.
No kidding! They object to “baby”, “person”, and even sometimes to “abortion” (as in: I can’t have a baby right now, I need to have a choice). Of course they’d take issue with mass-murder and genocide…