Divine darkness

The next subject to come up for discussion was not exactly a motion - well not at first anyway. It turns out that the Divine Light Mission wants to book a room in the Union Building. Instead of making a decision on this, the executive passed the buck to S.R.C. (because Lisa Sacksen had some sort of conscience trouble or something). It turned into quite a heated debate with (mainly) David Newton and the Inevitable Lloyd Jobson for, and Peter Aagard and Anthony Ward against, with Lisa shouting 'order, order!' every so often, somewhere in between. Eventually Mr Aagard moved a motion attempting to ban the DLM from the Association buildings. Mr Ward, in line with his 'Keep Left' policy, apparently moved so far in this direction he circumnavigated, only to reappear in facist guise by seconding this repressive motion.

Briefly, the argument against letting 'them' use our building was that we are fairly ignorant of their 'policy,' but it seems they are an organization of Sll-repute' (or, as Mr Ward would have it, 'rather pernicious') led by a fat little Indian who is twenty-five but pretends to be sixteen, and manages to suck quite large sums of money out of his followers. If 'they' were allowed into our building some students might become followers and lose a lot of money We could not, of course, allow this to happen (which is being consistent with our outlawing of gambling in the Union which causes suicide).

Anthony Ward, "father pernicious"

On the other hand, these followers who were supposedly being taken for a ride were doing so of their own free will. This was not a repressive situation as the situation in South Africa and Malaysia is. (We banned delegates from these countries from coming to a conference in our Union Building.)

It is absurd to imply that we are poor defenceless students who are going to fall under the evil influence of this cult, and need to have it censored like a Night Porter. They will be paying for the use of a room and so we will actually benefit from it. Another guy, Tom Duggan, pointed out that the proposed motion, rather than being in line with S.R.C, gambling laws was, in actual fact, a contradiction of S.R.C. policy on censorship. The debate went back and forth like this for some time - Mr Aagard describing all opposition as 'liberal shit' - and in the end this most repressive move was defeated.