Open Letter: To the Civil Liberties & Public Policy program

An Open Letter to the Civil Liberties & Public Policy (CLPP) program and the Hampshire Community

from Sunsara Taylor 
and members of StopPatriarchy.org who attended the CLPP Conference:

We are outraged at the illegitimate, immoral and dangerous decision made by CLPP organizers, including CLPP Director Mia Sullivan, to use police to eject us from your conference under threat of arrest simply for peacefully advocating an anti-pornography position to those who approached us at our own organizational table on Saturday, April 13, 2013.

This action on your part violates the most basic and essential standards of any movement against oppression.  The police are the armed enforcers of a highly oppressive and repressive state.  There is a long and brutal history of the role of the police – from the murder and wrongful imprisonment of Black Panther Party members in the 1960s to the more recent coordinated brutality inflicted on Occupy protesters across the country – in attempting to crush, punish, and demoralize those who would lift their heads to fight against oppression.  No one who calls on the police to suppress and physically threaten others who are fighting against oppression can legitimately claim to be doing anything other than the work of this highly oppressive, violent, and repressive state.

We demand that you repudiate this decision 

Read more »

What's the Real Deal About CLPP & StopPatriarchy.org?

What's the Real Deal About the Hampshire CLPP Reproductive Freedom Conference Using Police to Eject Stop Patriarchy From Their Conference Under Threat of Arrest?

For a video explanation of what happened please watch:

On April 12, 2013 eight members of the movement to End Pornography and Patriarchy: The Enslavement and Degradation of Women (StopPatriarchy.org) traveled up to Hampshire College to take part in the annual conference sponsored by the program for Civil Liberties and Public Policy (CLPP) called “From Abortion Rights to Social Justice, Building the Movement for Reproductive Freedom.”

We were motivated to attend by our overall opposition to the war on women, but especially by the extremeness of the attacks on abortion in the last few months.  In addition to learning from and connecting with others, we aimed to bring in a program of mass political resistance and struggle to counter the spate of new laws, threats, stigma and restrictions on abortion access throughout the country – starting with the April 25^th Student Day of Action for Abortion On Demand and Without Apology and continuing through major plans this summer.

At the same time, StopPatriarchy.org sees the assault on the right to abortion as the “mirror opposite” of the assault and violence against women being mainstreamed through the increasingly degrading, cruel, brutal and humiliating nature of pornography and the massive growth of the global sex industry which has destroyed the lives of millions upon millions of women and very young girls.  This is something we were prepared to engage people over.  And within all this, some of us were bringing the view of all-the-way revolution, rooting the 40 years of backlash against women's rights as well as the New Jim Crow and other crimes against the people in the system of capitalism-imperialism and advocating for revolution and communism as it has been re-envisioned by Bob Avakian [http://revcom.us/avakian/index.html].

Differences in Approach Emerge the First Night 

The first night of the CLPP conference

Read more »