Anger is mounting over an event at the University of Southern Maine which showcases the artwork of convicted cop-killer Thomas Manning. Speaking at the opening reception will be Raymond Luc Levasseur, who is billed on the USM website as a “former jailed dissident.” The website fails to mention that Levasseur was a member of the terrorist organization “Ohio Seven,” which carried out ten bank robberies and nineteen bombings of U.S. military research facilities and corporate offices. Members of the same group also operated under the name United Freedom Front, and caused dozens of injuries, including a bombing of a Boston-area courthouse in 1976 which injured twenty-two people. Manning was sentenced to eighty years in prison for the murder of New Jersey State Trooper Phillip Lamonaco who was thirty-two years old at the time, and left behind a young wife and three children.

Raymond Luc Levasseur, who will speak at the opening reception for the USM event, was questioned by the police during the investigation of Officer Lamonaco’s murder. The opening reception will offer “music, the spoken word, and free organic food provided by the Portland Green group ‘Portland Victory Garden.’”The website of the University of Southern Maine states that the purpose of the event will be to discuss “how far citizens should go in protesting their government…”

Clearly, the time has come to speak frankly. The murder of a young police officer and the bombing of federal facilities is not “protest.” It is terrorism. To raise the question of whether or not terrorism is an appropriate form of dissent, is tantamount to legitimizing robbery, murder, and bombing in the minds of impressionable young people.

One wonders why there is no outcry from Stephen Wessler’s group “The Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence” which was formerly headquartered at, and funded by the University of Southern Maine. Are we to believe that nineteen bombings, ten bank robberies, and the murder of a young police officer, do not rise to the level of a hate crime against the American people?

Instead, their attention is turned to the actions of Brent Matthews, a hard-luck case, a poorly-educated day laborer from Lewiston whose claim to notoriety consists of ruining his own life by rolling a frozen pig’s head into an Islamic Center on Lisbon Street. Because of the atmosphere of political correctness which casts a growing shadow over our society, Matthews’s actions will no doubt earn him a lengthy stay in federal prison.

But unlike Matthews’s ill-considered “practical joke,” the actions of Lavasseur and Manning were thought out with cold-blooded precision and exhaustive premeditation. Their deep-seated malice towards America resulted in not only harm to themselves and hurt feelings to others, but the death of a heroic police officer, and the injury of a score of our fellow citizens.

The public needs to think long and hard why someone like Brent Matthews is vilified, while at the same time, Lavasseur and Manning are elevated to the status of heroes.

My own reception at the University of Maine at Machias was a case in point. I was heckled and ridiculed for daring to speak out in support of such a controversial issue as marriage and the family. It was clear to me at the time that a well-organized opposition was desperately trying to shout down my point of view.

One thing is clear. If the Left is allowed to continue its efforts to glorify evil and silence decency, there won’t be much left of America at all.