After conservative author and columnist Ann Coulter told a University of Texas crowd that she believes marriage is between a man and a woman, an English student who heckled her with a reference to anal sex and was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. The arrest served as a kind of climax to an evening of endless heckling and shouting during Coulter’s comments.
“You say you believe in the sanctity of marriage. How do you feel about marriages where the man does nothing but fuck his wife up the ass?” sophomore English student Ajai Raj was quoted as shouting to Coulter during a question-and-answer period when the topic of gay marriage arose.
University of Texas police declined comment when reached by AVNOnline.com. “It’s still an open case,” an unidentified police official said, referring questioners to the account in the campus newspaper, the Daily Texan. But Free Speech Coalition executive director Michelle Freridge told AVNOnline.com that the right to free speech must be respected, even for a speaker with whom one disagrees.
“The underlying issue isn’t about the content of either what Ann was saying or what this gentleman was saying,” she said. “You don’t have to agree with people. You just have to respect their rights to free speech.”
Coulter spoke May 3 at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum on campus. Former Student Events Center president Matt Hardigree told the student newspaper that Raj had been disruptive throughout the entire period, at one point during which Coulter reportedly threatened to stop taking questions unless he and other hecklers were silenced.
"He took the opportunity to say something lewd and offensive and then made masturbatory gestures as he exited," Hardigree told the Daily Texan. He also said a representative from the campus office of the dean of students asked some protesters before the Coulter speech to sit in the back with signs or leave quietly if they wanted to leave.
The paper quoted a friend of Raj, Jeffrey Stockerwell, as saying police seized Raj “violently” and searched him illegally after he asked Coulter the question.
Daily Texan associate editor Clint Johnson told AVNOnline.com the campus wasn’t exactly festering over the Coulter-Raj incident. “No protests, no rallies,” he said. “Everything’s pretty much just normal here, but people are talking.”
Johnson said opinions on campus the morning after seemed split along predictable lines. “I heard some people sort of disagreeing with the decision to arrest the guy. A lot of people are saying he should have just been ejected,” he said. “I’d say it’s pretty split among the right and the left. … The right is complaining about the protesters, and the left is sort of just complaining about Ann Coulter in general and the arrest, which is what you might expect.”
Representatives of the Texas branch of the American Civil Liberties Union were unavailable for comment before this story went to press, but Freridge said that Coulter and Raj alike have rights no matter how unpopular the issue they addressed or the comments they made might have been.
“And so it’s interesting to me that [Raj] got arrested,” she said. “The question is, was it really disorderly conduct, or was it an attempt to control and censor his right to free speech? Within a formal lecture environment like this, where someone is doing a presentation, they are entitled to a certain level of respect. They shouldn’t be afraid of things being thrown at them.”
The Coulter incident occurred on the same day and in the same capitol city where the Texas House of Representatives passed a bill restricting “overtly sexually suggestive” performance routines by cheerleaders in the state, with the bill’s author – Rep. Al Edwards (D-Houston) – saying the bawdy routines result in pregnancy, dropouts, and spreading sexually transmitted diseases.
Tuesday night wasn’t exactly the first time Coulter faced hostile audiences at campus appearances. Last October, at the University of Arizona, the conservative columnist and author of Treason and High Crimes and Misdemeanors ducked when two men ran on stage during an otherwise undisrupted appearance, throwing pies at her without hitting her.
She joked about the incident afterward: “From that far away they can’t even hit me?”
