In "Love is Propaganda" (Feb. 15), Ginny Robinson argues that anyone considering the Love is Love campaign with "more than a precursory glance" would find it a "dextrous use of propaganda to advance a social agenda." The word she was looking for was, I believe, "cursory," but that is beside the point - Ginny's glance was blinded by ideology and her column was more propagandistic than last Friday's campaign.
Ginny veiled her argument as a call for "critical thought," but this purported lack of bias was misleading. She clearly had a bone to pick with the LGBT community's social agenda, inserting an early aside about the debatable virtue of supporting same-sex love. If this first ideological jab was a deft maneuver, her second one - citing the many students supposedly hoodwinked by Obama's "Change We Can Believe In" slogan - was much more obvious. Careful Ginny: Your conservative views are showing. As you wrote, "arguments should be based on fact, not feeling."
Was the campaign propagandistic? Only if we skew the definition of propaganda to include every campaign slogan, every jingle and every catchphrase that conveniently stands in for a larger argument. (Should they have printed essays on their t-shirts?) If the potential pitfall of slogans is in their propensity to simplify, then their positive power is in the paradigm shifts they can enact in polarized issues. Sure, the campaign was political, but it didn't say "support same-sex marriage." All it did was ask us to put aside paltry arguments about the erosion of our social institutions or Biblically-coded morality and defend the delegitimization of love between consenting adults inherent in our country's lack of support for same-sex relationships. Personally, I've yet to hear someone do so compellingly.
"Love is Propaganda?" was threaded with elitist descriptions of the University's student body as uncomprehending masses. It compared the Love is Love campaign to the slogan of the Bolshevik revolution, using an exaggerated and connotatively violent metaphor to shock readers into swallowing its argument. It interpreted the slogan in question as a denial of "the complexity of love," willfully misinterpreting it by taking it literally in an attempt to undercut its message. In her portrayal, Ginny completely politicized the campaign, ignoring its value as a visual show of support for often ostracized members of our community. She quoted one student who wore a shirt without understanding the movement and presented this "finding" as representative of the entire campaign. Could our LGBT Resource Center have done more to make sure everyone involved was fully informed? Sure. Was Ginny's column propagandistic? You tell me.
Spencer Peterson\nCLAS III
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