Students Charged for Challenging Mrs. Cheney's Homosexual Marriage Stance

by Jim Brown
March 24, 2004

(AgapePress) - Three University of Maryland students claim they were harassed and intimidated by university police during a recent visit to the school by the wife of Vice President Dick Cheney. Yet somehow, it is the students who are facing charges for their actions at the campus event.

That event was a question-and-answer session on policy issues featuring Lynne Cheney, a former homosexual rights activist whose daughter is openly homosexual. The incident happened after graduate student Ryan Grim asked the Vice President's wife a volatile question: "Dr. Cheney, would you attend your daughter Mary's wedding if she married a person of the same gender?"

That was when, according to Grim, the university police descended on him and two other students and threatened them with arrest. The police have since charged the three students with disorderly conduct and disrupting a student event, and Grim and the others could face penalties ranging from a letter of reprimand to expulsion.

Grim feels the officials overreacted. "The university -- and our country as a whole right now -- is just kind of afraid to speak out against any form of authority. People think that any question of our current leadership is somehow unpatriotic or undemocratic and aids enemies of the United States. I think that people are just overly sensitive right now," he says.

If the university fails to apologies and drop the charges, Grim says he and the other two students may file a lawsuit with assistance from the campus American Civil Liberties Union. But at present, he says the three of them are not participating in the legal process, "because we, first of all, don't dispute what we did."

That would be pointless, Grim says, since everything that happened was videotaped. "CSPAN was there, CNN was there," he notes, "so there's no point in us disputing what they say we did. We're only saying that we acted within our rights."

Grim says whatever the university officials decide to do will be "up to them," but he guesses and hopes the punishment will be "closer to the reprimand side."