The Case Against David Freddoso: Author of The Case Against Obama

I haven’t read the book. But I went to Notre Dame with David Freddoso, author of best-selling “The Case Against Barack Obama” and felt I should relate my experiences. During that time in school, I was a progressive leader on campus and he belonged to a group of conservatives who were trying not just to oppose our goals (which would be understandable), but also to shut our organizations down. The main targets of the attacks were the Women’s Resource Center, the Progressive Student Alliance, and the unrecognized LGB student group.

Freddoso belonged to a group of students who published a newspaper called “Right Reason”. They took an aggressive approach to pushing their views. This was apparent in their April 1998 newspaper’s slogan and Jesus quote “Not peace, but the sword” (albeit which they toned down next year to: “The Truth Will Set You Free”).

By contrast to the aggressive methods of the right, progressive activists worked to build broad coalitions for our causes. For instance for the issue of including sexual orientation in the non-discrimination clause, according to polls we had approximately 75% student support - and won student senate and faculty senate votes with 90% on our side. We had anarchists, socialists, and progressives working with moderates. We even had a College Republican vice-president speak at one of our rallies! While the campus right was engaged in name-calling and intimidation (not just in the conservative Right Reason, but also in the main student newspaper The Observer), we stuck to the facts.

Right Reason argued that students should not be able to form official student organizations if the group violated their definition of Catholicism. The administration already held restrictive views of what students could do. For instance, there has been an unofficial gay, lesbian, and bisexual student group for over twenty years that is tolerated, but not officially recognized. They can meet on campus, but their attempts to do publicity (put up posters, set up a table, advertise in the newspaper) or sponsor events are met with repression. Every several years, the students re-apply and get turned down.

The Attack on The Women’s Resource Center and Feminism
The administration also makes it very difficult to form a feminist group. They are extremely wary of having an organization that would be pro-choice, and thus they vacillate between requiring that any feminist organization be explicitly pro-life and “permitting” feminist groups to be neutral on the issue. When Freddoso and I were students there was a moderately feminist group called the Women’s Resource Center that focused on education and awareness. One of its main tasks was having a center with information where people could come and visit. The organization was both neutral and inactive on the abortion issue. At the time one co-president was pro-life, the other pro-choice.

The right-wingers sent a woman to the Women’s Resource Center to ask for information on abortion to see what they could get. A volunteer gave them a leaflet from Planned Parenthood that was from the organization’s private files. It was not on public display, and was not intended to be given out.

The right, including Freddoso who played a central role in the story, turned this into a blazing front-page headline and the leading multi-page story in the April 1998 issue of Right Reason (and a major follow-up story in the fall). They also reported it to Student Activities who proceeded to individually question the Women’s Resource Center’s officers. Student Activities considered putting a ban on the WRC having information about contraception and sexual orientation, but instead put them on notice, with a two year probation - meaning that they could lose their status if they broke the rules a second time. Personally, I was willing to take on the probation and fight it, but the WRC chose not to do so. The two year probation was later reduced to one year, but the message was still sent - feminist students need to be careful.

The Attack on The Progressive Student Alliance
In February 1998, I started the Progressive Student Alliance - a multissue activist group with the goal of increasing the level of activism on campus. We were an unofficial group, because instead of using the official procedure of having a small group of people meet in private and write the group’s constitution, we held a kick-off meeting that attracted fifty people to approve our mission statement and later our constitution. We didn’t wait to get officially recognized, quickly organizing a teach-in to oppose Clinton’s plans to start bombing Iraq, and later a 175 person rally to support a professor and priest, Fr David Garrick, who resigned due to the university’s refusal to add sexual orientation to the nondiscrimination clause.

In the same April 1998 issue of Right Reason that attacks the WRC, they call on vice-president O’Hara listing the names of people involved in the PSA, quoting emails from our email list without permission (which they proudly admit to have “infiltrated”), and calling on her to ensure that we weren’t recognized. Their attack on PSA was the secondary story in the newspaper and contained several lies.

As PSA applied for recognition, I and another officer had to meet with the Director of Student Activities who wanted to know what we planned to do. He subtly hinted at the administration’s fear that we would be a front for the unrecognized lgb student group. The right was unsuccessful in their primary goal, as the PSA was recognized over the summer, however they helped build a culture of intolerance towards activism - where it was difficult for students to stand up for what they believed in.

During the years that followed, the PSA has consistently been in conflict with the administration that has tried to restrict our right to do benign things like chalking (corporations can hire people to advertise and chalk their text book website addresses, but our chalk generally gets hosed down), putting up posters, passing out leaflets, and doing outreach to staff advocating for workers rights.

A Culture of Intolerance
To understand David Freddoso’s role at Notre Dame, you need to understand the campus climate. The student body is slightly conservative, but has enough liberals that there is a sizable force of activists. There would be even more activism if the administration wasn’t creating rules to make it hard and erratically applying them. Besides student groups, since the eighties the administration has censored every form of student media including student radio stations (FM and AM), the daily newspaper (The Observer), the bi-weekly magazine (Scholastic), and the poetry and arts magazine (the Juggler).

There is a currently a nexus of hot issues including the Queer Film Festival, the Vagina Monologues, and including sexual orientation in the non-discrimination clause. The right (including the current conservative newspaper the Irish Rover, the local bishop, and a newly formed conservative alumni group) argues that the Queer Film Festival and Vagina Monologues should be stopped. While not going that far, the administration puts restrictions on them that hamper student organizing.

The right argues that the administration should be teaching students that homosexuality is “objectively disordered”. While I was a student, the Strake Foundation sponsored/funded a campus lecture series on the theme of “curing” homosexuality. By contrast the administration has taken several good, but incomplete, steps towards including LGB students (like its 1997 Statement of Inclusion, in response to student activism, called for acceptance of students without being legally binding). I think student activists will win this one.

Conclusion
Notre Dame is at a crossroads. The 85% of students who are Catholic hold a different view of what Catholicism means than the administration, much like the situation in the greater Catholic Church. Ten years after I was involved in a campaign to add sexual orientation to the nondiscrimination clause, students are doing it again and it’s twice as big. Freddoso was part of a group of rightwing students that tried to stop the liberal side from being able to organize and argue for its views through intimidation and directly appealing to the administration to shut us down. That’s plain wrong.

Background Information
-My essay on barriers to activism at Notre Dame:
http://www.campusactivism.org/displayresource-59.htm

-My history of Notre Dame student activism:
http://www.campusactivism.org/displayresource-60.htm

-Right Reason archived:
http://web.archive.org/web/19981202233059/http://www.rightreason.org/