A friend of my roommate’s, Sarah, came up to me and smiled. She said, “I didn’t know you were a Republican. That’s cool, I am too.” Unlike me, wearing a College Republican shirt and holding a McCain-Palin sign, she had nothing political on her. I asked her why she didn’t want to come help make a presence at the show, and she told me that she has two ultra-liberal suitemates who didn’t know she was a conservative.

She didn’t want to incur the wrath of some closed-minded liberals on campus, who, in recent times, have become as intolerant as the people liberals themselves fought during the civil rights era. Sarah’s fear is understandable and relatable.

Let me clarify: I have found that the vast majority of the Democratic supporters are respectable and kind despite our differences of opinion. That Thursday of the vice presidential debate, in the pushy crowd with liberal students all around me, many of them allowed me to hold up a sign without trying to block it, and I returned the favor. We were able to have pleasant discussions about current political issues. I appreciate those who can acknowledge our differences of opinion without disrespecting or demonizing them.

This leads me to the topic of those who were a disgrace and simply too overzealous in silencing all dissenting opinions on campus. One girl, for example, tried to get on a guy’s back to block my yellow sign. At the time, I was toward the back, and other Obama signs were blocking most of my sign anyways. One kid put a sign next to mine saying, “I’m with stupid.” The worst was when a friend of mine who is in my fraternity and is an Obama supporter was given stickers by an older man and told to somehow put them on my sign. My friend told me what the man instructed him to do, showed me the stickers and then dropped them. A woman from Planned Parenthood threw a condom at me (an obvious student group, right?). All of this surprisingly occurred during the first broadcast of “Hardball.”

I also feel the need to set the record straight on a few other things that occurred during the event. First, there was a lot of controversy surrounding the half-dozen older Republican supporters holding those yellow signs. What Student Life left out of their report and their interview with me was that the liberals also had older supporters in the crowd, and probably many more than we did. The guy that gave my friend the stickers to put on my sign was easily in his mid-thirties. Now if you want proof that older Democrats were doing the same, I took pictures of quite a few union workers in the crowd (Obama supporters of course). The union is called the IUPAT (or the AFL-CIO), and they slipped in just as easily as those infamous Republicans. I am sure those union workers were not students, but why were they not reported about in Student Life? I think I have an answer to that question: Republicans stand out and are such a minority that when a student sees an older Republican, it stands out much more than a middle-aged Democrat. Oh, did I mention the “Rednecks for Obama”?

That entire day was probably one of the most demoralizing times for me as a Republican. Liberals who are so strongly in favor of such ideas as gay rights, affirmative action and fair wages were shown also to be the biggest hypocrites. They are in favor of equality and freedom of speech for the small minorities, but when the small minority happens to disagree with their goals, they are instantly attacked and silenced. It is truly sad when a small amount of liberal extremists begin to practice exactly what they fought against during the Jim Crow era and the gay rights movement. These new agents of intolerance are a small but extremely vocal group of liberals.

Before I stopped talking to Sarah, as she was helping the CNN bus, she told me one small thing that will stay with me for a while. She said, “Maybe tonight I will wear a red shirt…” If only she could do that and not be ridiculed or ostracized for her beliefs.

(Some names have been changed to protect individuals’ identities, but the events appear exactly as they happened.)