Pro-life posters placed around Loyola Marymount University’s campus by a Catholic student group are being torn down this week.
Students at Loyola Marymount University, a Catholic institution in Los Angeles, are squaring off with anonymous vandals who have torn down nearly 200 pro-life flyers they had placed around campus.
The posters, which advocated a unique anti-abortion and pro-immigration stance, were torn down by members of the community who weren’t sympathetic to students contradicting the campus’ political orthodoxy on the abortion issue.
According to the university’s student newspaper, students bragged about tearing down the posters on a community Facebook page. “Yeah we’ve been scrambling to take [the posters] down, Chris Lorenzo did like three buildings,” one commenter wrote.
Delano Perera, a senior theology and philosophy major and president of the student organization that posted the flyers, explained that the flyers were meant to promote the Catholic perspective on abortion rights.
“Everyday over 1,000 babies are put to death because of abortion, and we wanted to bring awareness to this evil,” said Perera. “I […] and many of our group members come from migrant families. Some of them will be affected by DACA. We care for our migrant brothers and sisters as we care for our unborn brothers and sisters.”
“I was pretty upset that the posters were taken down so quickly because we put up almost 200 posters and all of them were taken down so quickly,” Perera added in a comment to the College Fix.
“As Catholics, we believe that all lives are valuable and should be protected. They said that we were plagiarizing them, but the posters were meant to draw parallels between the two issues,” he continued. “They wanted to take them down because they did not like the message and felt that they were doing the right thing in taking down something that they disagreed with.”
Loyola Marymount Philosophy Professor Christopher Kaczor helped to design the controversial poster. He and Perera claimed that the posters were designed to provoke.“Even though [Loyola] is labeled as a Catholic school, there are many faculty and students who are not welcoming to students who want to express their Catholic faith,” Kaczor explained.