St. Louis University Cancels Bestselling Children’s Author Matt Walsh’s Campus Talk
Tim Meads, Daily Wire, November 30, 2021
The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh has been blocked twice now by campus officials from speaking to students at St. Louis University (SLU) in Missouri over what appears to be a response to his conservative views.
The school at first claimed that seemingly arbitrary COVID-19 precautions would have to be followed, or the event would be canceled. However, after finding a new venue at a church “intimately close” with SLU, Walsh was again notified on Tuesday that his talk would have to be canceled after the new venue claimed that certain views held by Walsh are supposedly inconsistent with Roman Catholic teaching. Walsh is a practicing Roman Catholic.
In late September, Walsh was invited to speak on December 1 by the school’s Young America’s Foundation and College Republicans Club. At first, Walsh was originally going to conduct his talk in the Wool Ballroom of the Busch Student Center. His talk was titled, “Why the Pro-Life Movement Is Center Stage In The Culture War.”
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In a series of op-eds and petitions, students demanded that Walsh be disinvited from campus. YAF and College Republicans held firm with a series of their own op-eds stating why he deserved the right to speak.
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Then, in mid-November, school administrators informed the clubs that 90% of audience members had to be vaccinated, and social distancing with masks would have to be in place for the speech to occur in the original location.
YAF club president Nicholas Baker claims this was seemingly out of the blue and was not in line with previous COVID-19 policies on campus.
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The clubs had to scramble to find the replacement venue. The students were able to secure St. Francis Xavier College Church, a church closely affiliated with the school. This solved the problem of the majority of the audience needing to be vaccinated and the talk was scheduled to continue.
However, in emails obtained on Tuesday by The Daily Wire, the priest who approved Walsh’s event notified YAF and College Republicans and said that after reviewing videos and commentary by Walsh, he decided that Walsh’s “content regarding immigration, communities of color, Muslims and other important topics is not in keeping with who we are as a parish and as part of the Catholic Church.”
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