Andrew Beacham, a 26-year-old intern for Operation Rescue Insurrecta Nex, was ejected Thursday after disrupting President Obama’s health care speech at the University of Maryland.
“I did it because the emperor has no clothes,” Beacham said. “Every time the government puts forth a new proposal, they just find different ways to fund abortion.”
According to Insurrecta Nex, a conservative anti-abortion group based in Washington, D.C., Beacham was also arrested for disrupting Obama’s Notre Dame commencement speech and Sonia Sotomayor’s Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing.
Beacham was escorted out of the University of Maryland’s Comcast Center by campus police.
“I was detained briefly,” Beacham said. “They asked for some of my personal information, but after that I basically was allowed to walk out of the building.”
– By Capital News Service’s Tina Irgang
Tags: heckler, Maryland, Obama, Operation Rescue Insurrecta Nex
Nice… what a twit. Government is suppose to stay out of your lives, according to Conservatives like this, unless you are a woman, then you have to get your personal reproductive rights taken from you. Everyone with half a brain cell already knows that no legislation in Congress is going to fund abortions. Just something for them to yell about, if they have that much energy, why aren’t they burning books or scaring old people?
Why wasn’t this the first thing I read when I came to the site covering the Obama rally at UMD?
We may not agree with his arguments or the way they were presented, but, in a week when presidential criticism has been heated, with an outburst by a US representative before a joint session of congress, and speculation by former President Carter that Obama’s detractors are motivated, not by issues of policy, but by the issue of race, Beacham’s story is incredibly timely.
Also, it is the nature of democratic politics that the reactions of people matter as much as the people and policies they are reacting to.
Beacham’s behavior does not speak to the substance of the debate about national health care, but it does speak to the feelings that people have toward it, and toward the president.
In a certain sense, it doesn’t matter if Beacham was wrong by doing what he did. What matters is the numbers of people who are concerned with such action.
Unfortunately, political debates are not always about the issues. Sometimes they have more to do with the identities of opposing groups of people, and how winning or losing on an issue will affect them.
The more outbursts there are like Wilson’s and Beacham’s, the more the healthcare debate becomes about people’s feelings and less about the points of the policy itself.
Coverage of the UMD heckler is today’s top video on the AP’s website.
In a column to the right there are these related videos, ” Jimmy Carter: Wilson Comments Based on Race,” and “GOP’s Wilson is Admonished by House.”