I am a believer in the First Amendment. I am a believer in speaking your mind, speaking your truth, and speaking up against injustice.

That being said, I am the first to admit that my campus is a place where I do not want to see hate speech, and especially not by a group that gets to go home and live their lives, knowing they’ve wasted the time of dozens, if not hundreds of students on this campus.

I had not even see the protest before I was able to hear it from my dorm window. Despite being on city property, my right to a peaceful campus was taken from me and my classmates.

There were religious protesters here from the Key of David Christian Center on November 15, and they were protesting...well, us. The simple way of explaining their rage is that we, as Blue Hens, are sinners. Put in a more complicated way, we weren’t the right kind of Christians, the right kind of women, or the right kind of people. And they LOVED US enough to come and tell us how wrong we have been living our lives.

We were screamed at that we were a lot of expletives I cannot write in a paper for public consumption. If you would like to hear the various things that were said to me personally, I would be happy to let you know.

But in the meantime….

I saw free speech being used to direct hatred at my fellow students for their gender identity, their sexuality, their religion, their clothes (anyone not covered up head to toe- or at least knee- was fair game), their voice, their body shape, and many other factors.

And I could not have been more proud of my campus community.

Perhaps the students who would have agreed with the protesters’ points of view were too shy to come and hang out, or else there weren’t any people that agreed with the blazing banners proclaiming all the reasons we were going to Hell.

I wouldn’t have minded if there were people to agree, because, safe behind their police barricade and trapped in their small-mindedness, we were able to rise above those hypocritical people with (mostly) grace and poise.

We conducted ourselves maturely, had as intelligent of conversations as we could have, and banded together to chant and cheer and stand up for our campus and our right to feel safe and comfortable with ourselves and the people we go to school with.

I am proud of my Blue Hen community. I am proud of the officers who stood by and endured the screaming back and forth for almost seven hours. I am proud of the students who were not protesting, but brought those officers coffee so they could keep warm doing their jobs. Heck, I’m even proud of the religious evangelists, both of the men, the two women, and the two children who spoke their minds.

And I am proud of my ability to go to these protests and keep writing about all the bullshit, as I will be for as long as I live.