Public protests regarding the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn its nearly 50-year-old Roe v. Wade ruling reached Butler County during the Fourth of July weekend.

A small group of Slippery Rock University students said they had a confrontation with Slippery Rock Mayor Jondavid Longo over messages they wrote in chalk protesting the decision, which gives rights regarding abortion to individual states.

The students had written the messages on the sidewalks along Main Street and Elm Street on Saturday morning prior to the planned Independence Day festivities. The messages were intended as a “silent and peaceful protest for the overturning of Roe v. Wade,” one of the students wrote in an online post.

Following the incident, a war of words between both sides ensued on social media platforms.

The students say Longo approached them with a police officer in the Gateway Park parking lot, where profane gestures were exchanged, according to both the students and Longo.

Longo said he was offended by the group’s placing of upside-down American flags on a veterans memorial site in the borough, and that the event had been planned to be inviting to families and children.

“That in and of itself on our nation's Independence Day and as a veteran is vulgar to me," he said at a borough council meeting last week. "You cannot fault me for wanting to put on an event that most people in this room participated in and for there to be vulgarities of differing things.”

Both sides have valid points.

The students claim their First Amendment right of free speech was quashed in Longo’s attempts at censorship. Longo says the students had no right to deface public property, especially on a weekend celebrating our nation’s independence.

As a journalist, I totally support freedom of speech, but I don’t condone defacing public property as a means to get the message across.

Think before you hit the button on that post or grab some sidewalk chalk to state your opinion.

— JG