Texas Students Arm Themselves With Dildos to Protest Guns on Campus
Make love, not liberty? Students urge the state to protect "cocks not glocks" on campus.
Students at the University of Texas-Austin plan to protest the permission of guns on campus by loading their backpacks with large dildos. The "Cocks Not Glocks: Campus (DILDO) Carry," scheduled for August 24, was organized in opposition to a 2015 state law saying gun-owners over 21-years-old with concealed-carry permits need not ditch their arms when they step into a campus building. It took effect August 1, 2016.
"The State of Texas has decided that it is not at all obnoxious to allow deadly concealed weapons in classrooms," states the Cocks Not Glocks website. But "it does have strict rules about free sexual expression, to protect your innocence. You would receive a citation for taking a dildo to class before you would get in trouble for taking a gun to class."
The group is referring to a Texas obscenity statute that says "no person or organization will distribute or display on the campus any writing or visual image, or engage in any public performance, that is obscene." And, indeed, Texas law specifies that obscene devives include "a dildo or artificial vagina." It's not clear, however, that any student has ever actually been arrested for carrying a dildo; Google turns up no such tale.
In any event, banning dildos on campus is silly. But so is preventing people from exercising other legally-protected freedoms—like carrying a gun—just because they're near some hallowed halls of learning. Whither the calls for cocks and glocks?
For their part, pro-open carry students are planning a counter-protest to next week's Cocks Not Glocks event. A Facebook invite for the counter-protest asks "liberty-minded students" to "bring pro-2A clothing, flags, signs, etc."
On August 4, Students for Concealed Carry sent a letter to the Texas attorney general asking for relief from the University of Texas (UT) Austin and UT-San Antonio's decision to allow individual professors to institute no-gun policies for their own offices.