As a conservative at UNC, you become accustomed to the idiotic insults leveled at you on a daily basis: e.g., “You’re wealthy [if only...] and hate the poor!”; “You hate gays!”; ad nauseam. But I never thought it would reach the point where I’m told that, basically, I hate Eve Carson and her legacy at UNC.

A little background: I’ve been exchanging emails with a few folks on the Eve Carson Distinguished Speaker Series Committee over their selection of Robert Gibbs as the speaker for the fall. My argument was two-fold: not only was he the fifth (of five) leftist they’ve invited to UNC, but he was a terrible press secretary (something many on the Left argued throughout his tenure). Was Dana Perino unavailable or something? They responded they tried to get a more diverse speaker, but their efforts fell through (yadda, yadda, yadda- somehow a small group like UNC College Republicans can bring conservative speakers galore, but a very distinguished, endowed speaker series just can’t make it work?).

To further prove my point, I posted six Youtube clips from some of his press conferences on the Facebook event page to show what a poor press secretary he was. Was six excessive? In retrospect, probably. I could have made my point in one or two, I’ll concede that. If someone had called me out for it, I would have gladly deleted them.

But instead, a member of the committee told me that I was disrespecting Eve herself by criticizing their event (I removed their name from the exchange):

Hi Anthony,
My name is ___ and I’m a member of the Eve Marie Carson Lecture Series. I respect the fact that you do not approve of us inviting Robert Gibbs as a speaker for the series, but I feel that is disrespectful to post certain things on the website. Eve was interested in bringing all types speakers to campus that would spark discussion and even debate among Carolina students, so I believe it is super disrespectul to her memory for you to be posting the things you’ve been posting. I trust you are a very intelligent, open-minded and all around nice person. So could you please stop posting such things. At least for Eve’s sake if nothing else. Thanks so much in advance.

Best,
____

My response:

Hi ____,
That is a fair point, and I would not do anything to disrespect Eve’s memory. I met her only once, but I respect her a great deal, and she was one of the greatest people I had the opportunity to meet.
However, I think I think it’s equally disrespectful to her legacy at UNC to use her name to legitimize yet another speaker series at UNC that does not bring speakers that actually “spark discussion and even debate” among the student body: a left-of-center speaker inherently cannot challenge a left-of-center campus. The history of your organization shows that you do not bring speakers of “all types,” unless by “all types” you mean hard leftist versus soft leftist, which doesn’t qualify as “all types” in my book.
I’ve already had a long conversation via email with Matt [Farley] and Will [Bondurant] about this, and I cannot buy the excuse that the speakers that you sponsored were the only ones that could work out. Even a small organization like UNC College Republicans over the last ten years was able to sponsor John Ashcroft, Karl Rove, Jonah Goldberg, and other famous speakers who actually challenged the student body and actually brought intellectual diversity to this campus, often times without support from this university and always without benefit of connections to the speakers themselves.
What I posted on the event wall was hardly offensive- they were clips from Robert Gibbs tenure as President Obama’s press secretary. If you have an issue with that, take it up with your guest, not me. They show that he was an incompetent press secretary, liberalism aside. In fact, leftist commentators were some of his most ardent critics.
What is more “super disrespectful” to me is that you would hide behind Eve Carson and her legacy at UNC in condemning a relatively mild critique of the speaker choice of a series after which she was named (I did not call him evil, stupid, etc., I merely stated that he was bad at his job). If anything, it is disrespectful to use her name to rubber-stamp a list of speakers without any intellectual diversity for which even a whiff of criticism for a selection would prompt an immediate response of “You’re insulting Eve!”
As a final note, I have no desire to continue posting on the event page, so don’t worry.

Cordially,
AED

In their response to that message, they declined to defend their position, so I see no point in printing it in full.

I suppose if you can’t justify your position with reason, you have no choice but to hide behind Eve Carson and attempt to shame someone into agreement. As to which is more insulting to her legacy- criticizing an event which bears her name or using her name to shame critics of the event- I’ll leave that up to you.