Yesterday, on hundreds of college campuses nationwide, students were handed a Hershey’s kiss with a free condom. This “Condom and a Kiss” campaign has been going on for several years and is a way for students who practice contraception or support it to spread their message and their products.
But yesterday, a new player entered the field. At the University of Mary Washington , a public university in Virginia, a group of students, called Project Plus, have been actively spreading a message opposed to this mentality via posters and articles in the school newspaper. Contradictory to the normally sexually spurred activities of Valentine’s Day, these students reached out to their peers with a message that “True Love is worth more than Contraception”. With full sized Hershey’s Chocolate Bars with that message on the front, they passed out 360 bars in less than 2 hours, even on a snow day for the small school which canceled classes. Perhaps because of the snow, the “Condom and a Kiss” campaign that the group hoped would be present did not show up. But they still had lots of good conversations and both positive and negative responses. As students entered the popular student café, members of Project Plus asked them if they would like a free candy bar. The most popular response was “No… wait, you said free?” The students were astonished that anyone would be handing out so much chocolate for free!
The theme of the chocolate bar give-away was “Without Contraception, you get so much more”, an analogy pertaining to the tiny Hershey’s Kisses that the “Condom and a Kiss” campaign hands out with condoms, compared to full sized Hershey’s bars. Inside the candy wrapper it read, “It makes sense that condoms are handed out today with nothing more than a tiny chocolate kiss. This reflects how little love you can express while using one. Using contraception tells your lover, ‘I don’t want to share every part of myself with you.’”
Project Plus considered the chocolate giveaway a complete success. Several other colleges around the country have joined to spread the group’s message. The founding members are hopeful that there will be enough funds for all the participating schools to hand out Chocolate bars next Valentine’s Day. Project Plus can be found online at www.theprojectplus.com
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Figures something cool like this would happen after I left Fredericksburg. St. Mary’s Church is close to UMW, and my mother-in-law just told us the university is buying property across the street from church. There’s a very active Catholic student organization, and while their campus minister is a bit left for our personal tastes, he’s clearly a very dedicated priest.
This reminds me, though, of one of my wife’s favorite anecdotes from her time at William & Mary. She was active in both Catholic Campus Ministry and Alternatives to Abortion. CCM leadership was largely liberal. All but one member of ATA were Catholic, and they were pretty much the vanguard of conservative Catholics on campus. So in some ways, ATA was “alternative Campus ministry for conservatives”. Anyway, the feminist student organization came to them one time and said, “We agree that women should seek alternatives to abortion. How about we reach a compromise and hand out condoms together?”
When the ATA president refused, stating the organization’s position on contraception, the shocked feminists called them fanatics and left.