Durant is reportedly well known to pro-life students at the university. She is the president/founder of a group called Bowling Green Student Rights Union (BGSRU). Her Facebook page also states that she is “a communist trying to spread the gay agenda.”
According to a pro-life group, Durant previously disrupted pro-life displays and “screamed, ‘You are promoting violence against women! Violence.'” The students said that, when they tried to deescalate the situation, she screamed “‘No, you dumb f*ck!’ [and] refused to answer why she was so upset and told us she didn’t want to speak with us before walking away.” They added:
An hour later, the girl — our SFLA group later learned named Soren — came back and screamed, “You are promoting violence by forcing people to stay pregnant!” We explained that we offer free resources to pregnant and parenting students and believe they deserve love and support. At this point she was slamming her fists on the table, yelling, “There is nothing loving about forcing people to give birth against their will!”
The claim that free speech is violence is a common rationale on the left for “deplatforming,” disrupting, and even attacking those with opposing views. We saw a similar confrontation by Hunter College professor Shellyne Rodríguez when she trashed a pro-life student display in New York. Most were focused on her profanity and vandalism (and her later arrest for chasing journalists with a machete), but there were familiar phrases that appeared in her diatribe to the clearly shocked students. Before trashing the table, she told the students, “You’re not educating s–t […] This is f–king propaganda. What are you going to do, like, anti-trans next? This is bulls–t. This is violent. You’re triggering my students.”
The two cases have other common elements, including the apparent lack of action by the universities in addressing such disruptive conduct before these individuals turned to violence or criminal acts. In the case of Hunter College, the college did not view Rodríguez’s trashing a table, screaming at students, and her invoking her status as a faculty member to be sufficient to fire Rodríguez. (They later fired her after she was charged after holding the machete to the neck of a journalist and chasing a television crew down the street).
There is no indication that Durant faced prior actions by her university.
This activist, who accused pro-life students of being violent, felt justified in not only abusing other students but allegedly committing criminal acts. It is the license of the age of rage where even criminal acts are deemed righteous because opposing views are deemed violent acts.
Durant has pleaded not guilty.