GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY (DC)
The Hoya
January 16, 2019
by Elianna Schiffrik
On Jan. 19, Georgetown will host the 20th Cardinal O’Connor Conference on Life. Student awareness of the event remains surprisingly low despite its self-proclaimed status as the “largest collegiate pro-life conference in the nation,” the controversial speakers it invites and the alarmingly consistent presence of high-profile Georgetown administrators at the conference. As this year’s conference approached, I mentioned it to many peers, but it seems very few students know it exists.
Given the administrators in attendance — Vice President for Student Affairs Todd Olson, Dean of Students Jeanne Lorde and Assistant Vice President Erika Cohen are all regular attendees — clearly the conference has institutional support. However, as a community of students, it shouldn’t have ours. Hoyas need to know that it exists and fight its shameful, consistent and unchallenged presence on our campus.
Occurring annually on the heels of the March for Life, the world’s largest pro-life rally, the conference attracts speakers and attendees largely from high school and collegiate groups attending the march. So like it or not, this conference matters — hundreds of people who attend each year leave with a distorted impression of Georgetown students, our community, and our values.
The namesake of the conference, Cardinal John O’Connor (GRD ’70), is a stain on Georgetown’s legacy and a disgrace to our community’s values. A notorious homophobe, O’Connor actively worked against the LGBTQ+ community through his efforts to overturn New York’s ordinance against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, block AIDS education programs and prevent the distribution of condoms as the AIDS epidemic decimated the gay community.
O’Connor also had heavily misogynistic inclinations, claiming abortion is immoral in the case of rape or incest because rape is a “legally lesser evil” than abortion. Moreover, he brushed aside the deaths of thousands of women forced to resort to unsafe abortion prior to legalization with the comment that “the mothers involved could have chosen not to abort.”
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