Scary Threats At Notre Dame

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Scary Threats At Notre Dame

There’s Queer Blood on Homophobic Hands from Audrey Lindemann on Vimeo.

Take a look at that. It’s a deranged poem read by Audrey Lindemann, a University of Notre Dame undergraduate, who published a version of it recently in the Notre Dame campus newspaper. In the print version, she also denounces Sycamore Trust and Young Americans For Freedom.

Here is the text of the audio on the clip:

Your homophobic

discourse soiled my

air supply your ivory

tower theology

slit my loved ones’

throats I’m trying

to go to class without

dead friends in my

backpack just trying

to touch my girl’s shoulder

in the grass you want

to un-affirm me to

“lobotomize me with a

crowbar” well the murdered

trans angels (18 this year yet)

leak brimstone into your

praying mouths

Students for Child Oriented Policy

Irish Rover

(you say my piece had violent undertones that it drew hostile attention you say “expressing a Catholic viewpoint should not be equated to committing a heinous crime” you contrasted your “reasoned opinion” with my “intellectual chaos” that you are “targeted” and I must respectfully say that the blood on your names did not come from you or the hate groups you’ve been inviting to speak on campus. It was ours and my loved ones. Your reasoned opinions seep into churches, into culture, they diffuse like venomous gas from every outlet, this is the very nature of discourse. Your articles have directly affirmed violent lurkers online who would have us lobotomized with crow bars, thrown back into the closet, expelled from the school. Catholic writers feel like targets? Queer people have, since the beginning of time, flown around on wings made of bullseyes, a trans woman wakes up in a dorm of hundreds of men, a trans boy is kicked out of his home as a teenager and haunts the streets like a ghost a black trans woman is shot through the stomach with a gun a black trans woman is burned beyond recognition with only teeth left scattered in the sand and this has everything to do everything to do with the discoursal irresponsibility of privileged “scholars” like you. I respect your academic freedom I just ask that next time you type out an article from behind your thousand dollar mac book you taste a little iron in your mouth and maybe it’s the blood of Dana Martin or Ashanti Cameron and maybe you feel dust in between your fingers and its the ashes of Bee Love Slater)

this is not scholarship it’s a pained snarl

from inside the dark wet belly of chaos

and it’s clawing at your cowardly pontification

you are nothing but a bullet

at the gay massacre

you beat us in alleys you

watched us die of AIDS

and yet I’m here, laying

waste to your reproductive

futurism your procreative shackles

I’m here in class

with my gender on my

sleeve and centuries of dead

queers in my old navy

backpack if you want me gone

come to my dorm room,

you are going to need

a backbone and better

words you are going to

need a much bigger

crowbar.

I’d say that Miss Lindemann has a Rich Inner Life. But if I were on Notre Dame’s campus, and had been targeted by her with such malicious invective, and my image had been subject to a beating with a crowbar, I would be worried.

Certainly Bill Dempsey, the head of Sycamore Trust, is concerned. Sycamore Trust is a group of ND alumni who seek “Catholic renewal” at the university. He wrote to Father John Jenkins, the school’s president, today:

Dear Father Jenkins,

The malignant poster recently displayed on campus and the venomous video that is posted on vimeo (http://tinyurl.com/y3tns4xe) surely must be major violations of the University’s Standards of Conduct. In addition, they seem plainly to violate Indiana’s “intimidation law,” which makes it a crime to incite violence or to take action intended to expose a person “to hatred, contempt, disgrace, or ridicule.” See Indiana Code Title 35. Criminal Law and Procedure § 35-45-2-1.

The students’ malicious and culpable intention is vividly evidenced on the poster by the perpetrators’ circling in fake blood the names of student, faculty and alumni authors of Irish Rover and Observer “homophobic” articles upholding Church teaching, and on the video by one perpetrator repeatedly bashing the photos on the poster with a crowbar while another holds up a copy of The Irish Rover.

In addition, the video leader assailed students associated with The Irish Rover and SCOP collectively, and in her Observer screed this morning she included students associated with Young Americans for Freedom and alumni associated with our organization, Sycamore Trust:

“leak brimstone into your

praying mouths

Young Americans for Freedom

Child Oriented Policy

Sycamore Trust

Irish Rover”

This is beyond vile. It is provocative and dangerous.

Rod Dreher is evidently the first to pick this up, but he certainly won’t be the last. See “Anti-Catholic Hate at Notre Dame” http://tinyurl.com/yxnt8q87 .

His conclusion:

“Whoever put this sign up slandered others at Notre Dame, attacked free speech, and is clearly trying to incite violence against them with that kind of incendiary rhetoric and symbolism. A line has been crossed. What is the university going to do about it?”

Since we are included as targets, we believe we have standing to ask precisely that question. We respectfully ask what you intend to do about it so that we can come to an informed judgment as to what we should do about it. As an immediate step, we strongly urge you to require the incendiary video be taken down. The longer it spews hatred, the more the risk of another Virginia Tech.

Very truly,

Bill Dempsey

Chairman

Sycamore Trust

At about the 1:50 mark, a student in the background begins to beat with a crowbar the poster bearing images of Lindemann’s opponents on campus. Here’s a still: