I love hanging around with pro-lifers who don’t take crap.
Gregg Cunningham, executive director of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, is 1 of those.
If you’re blessed to be a friend or colleague of Gregg’s, he blind copies you on emails he writes to detractors and opponents of CBR’s work. Gregg’s wit always cracks me up, and his chutzpah always inspires me.
Yesterday Gregg copied me on an email he sent to Pam Cysner, Student Affairs Officer at UCLA.
The administration at UCLA has been jerking CBR’s student co-sponsors around for a year trying to keep CBR from reserving space for a huge Genocide Awareness Project abortion photo display on Bruin Plaza….

(I’m sprinkling photos of other such GAP displays at various college campuses throughout this post. Click all to enlarge.)
I asked Gregg if I could post excerpts of his shock and awe letter to Cysner, and he said yes. I should mention Gregg is an attorney. Now this is hardball…
From: Gregg Cunningham [mailto:gregg@cbrinfo.org]
Sent: Wednesday, March 10, 2010 5:26 PM
To: pcysner@saonet.ucla.edu
Cc: ablum@conet.ucla.edu; glen.fichman@capnet.ucla.edu; pjasper@conet.ucla.edu; Gary McCaleb; mcohn@saonet.ucla.edu; alvaroday@ucla.edu
Subject: Genocide Awareness Project Plaza Reservation
Dear Ms. Cysner,
I direct The Center For Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR), the 501(c)3 organization which has, for approximately one year, been seeking to conduct, in conjunction with our UCLA student associates, constitutionally protected expressive activity on Bruin Plaza….
I just want to forewarn you that if this long-running and totally unreasonable reservations obstruction is not ended in the next few days, our organization will turn this matter over to our lawyers with instructions to prepare a First Amendment lawsuit against UCLA.
If you mistakenly believe that this notice is mere bluster, you would be well advised to visit our website at www.abortionNO.org to view a partial but lengthy list of the many government agencies which CBR has successfully sued for violations of our constitutional rights – frequently obtaining judgments obligating the offending entities to pay large attorney fee awards….
If our highly deferential attempts to accommodate the university’s time, place and manner concerns continue to prove fruitless and we are forced to litigate the constitutionality of your sustained refusal to accept our registration applications, we will, during the pendency of this lawsuit, display our exhibit on the UCLA campus using alternative modes of expression which are far more dangerous and wastefully consumptive of your resources and ours.
Because these methods are also far less effective, we will be compelled to visit your campus on many, many more display days than would be necessitated if we were able to reserve space on Bruin Plaza for two consecutive days. Since our attempts to cooperate with your administration have been futile, we will simply show up, with our abortion photo signs but without notice.
Although this approach will force the university to deal extemporaneously with the resulting security problems, it is clear to us that your administration is not interested in the sensible coordination these events.
If we are not permitted to reserve Bruin Plaza space for the orderly displays of our signs, behind our own crowd control barricades, CBR will exercise its alternative right to display its signs, using hand-held versions, in randomly chosen and constantly changing areas of the Plaza which are not reserved by others.
We will also expand our display to other areas of campus as necessary to access the largest numbers of passersby. We acknowledge the university’s right to make its facilities available through a constitutionally sound reservations process but we reject any argument that no expressive activity may take place on the Plaza or elsewhere unless it occurs in properly reserved areas….
As noted above, this hand-held sign method of expressing our point of view is not our preferred option, not least because it tends to create pandemonium and enormous policing difficulties. All sense of place is lost with the elimination of the boundaries created by crowd control barricades.
These boundaries are essential to effective police practices during inevitably contentious confrontations involving passersby. The barricades help security officers maintain reasonable separation among contending factions. The loss of this important crowd management mechanism invites disruption which tends toward the sort of disorder that can quickly escalate into violence.
Representative examples of the kinds of threats and assaults by which CBR’s staff has been victimized can be seen and heard on the CBR website at http://www.abortionno.org/GAP/violence/violence.html.
These incidents were, virtually without exception, attributable to the absence of a reserved and adequately secured space and or an adequate police presence. These public safety deficiencies frequently provoke violence from passersby who exploit the opportunity to act out with impunity.
The public display of CBR’s abortion photos is so inherently dangerous that one of our volunteers, the late James Pouillon, was shot and killed while holding an abortion photo which he was showing to students. His murderer confessed that his attack was motivated by anger at the public display of abortion photos. It is a miracle that no bystanders were hit by stray bullets. UCLA is an open, urban campus where the potential for similar violence is not merely theoretical.
Please also be advised that CBR is retaining the services of public relations consultants who will be encouraging and coordinating extensive news coverage of CBR’s activities at UCLA.
We are offering you an opportunity to accommodate two days of orderly, peaceful, lawful, expressive activity in reserved space on Bruin Plaza.
The alternative will be a lengthy and expensive lawsuit (we have successfully prosecuted appeals all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court on multiple occasions) and frequent campus chaos which will force you to pay a great deal of overtime compensation to security personnel – not because we are behaving unlawfully, but because you are denying us an opportunity to express our point of view in a way which minimizes the risk that passersby will behave unlawfully.
The nature or our working relationship, cooperative or adversarial, is entirely up to UCLA but I can assure you, we will not be pushed off your campus. We have conducted this project at schools all over the country, more than 160 times over the last eleven years. We have never allowed any administration to violate our rights and we never will, no matter what the cost. Our message is highly disfavored and the moment we allow any school to become abusive, the precedent will invite future schools to do the same.
Our principle offices are located in Southern California, affording us easy access to your campus. If you want this dispute to become a protracted battle, we are well disposed to accommodate that wish. But our preference is for a display which can be concluded briefly, professionally and in a spirit of collegiality, if not bon ami.
We await your decision but if we are unable to reach an acceptable accord in the next few days, we are going to begin lawful exhibitions without your approval in the next few weeks and the process of vindicating of our legal rights soon thereafter.
Respectfully,
Gregg Cunningham
Director, The Center For Bio-Ethical Reform