Liberals collect stories about Wasinger. Julie R. Cooper '94, an editor of the liberal monthly Perspective who lived in Wasinger's Thayer Hall entryway in their first year, recalls that on the eve of the Persian Gulf War, Wasinger had a message board on the door to his room that read, "Give war a chance, we've tried peace long enough."

When a friend of Cooper's tore down the message board, "it wasn't a politically motivated incident, it was just drunken stupidity," Cooper says. But she says Wasinger interpreted the act as politically motivated and went to the proctor to complain.

Wasinger, who still has the message board in question, maintains that the "petty vandalism" was politically motivated, and says the messages on the board related to AALARM and "something about silence and death."

Joshua L. Oppenheimer '96, a founder of the Association for the Absence of Rabid Moralism (AFARM)--a direct response to AALARM--remembers seeing Wasinger's not-so-Christian behavior in line in the Eliot House dining hall. When Wasinger's friend dropped a spoon, Wasinger kicked it to a dining services worker to pick up off the floor, Oppenheimer says, and the worker couldn't believe it.

"He gave her the gift of humiliation so that she could find righteousness," Oppenheimer says with heavy sarcasm.

Wasinger denies the story.

By Wasinger's own account, he's been booed and stared at in dining halls, subjected to 14 or 15 harassing phone calls a night at times and pilloried in the press. While Wasinger claims that "there is a sizable minority of people who are very silent but agree with Peninsula," even he acknowledges that "it's nowhere near a majority."

Wasinger himself would never be mistaken for a member of any Nixonian silent majority.

"Rob thrives on confrontation, on the thrill of the fight," says his friend Brown. "Rob likes to get it out there in print."

Another friend, Thomas E. Woods '94, attests to Wasinger's fame--or infamy--by saying, "I got my reputation as the guy who hangs around Rob Wasinger."

The campus press has paid attention, as have the national media, drawn by his strident, eminently quotable rhetoric.

For example, Wasinger calls the pro-choice movement "a culture of death that seeks to destroy life at every conceivable opportunity...nothing less than the ideological descendants of the pro-slavery people."

And Gomes, who announced he was gay at a rally held to denounce the Peninsula issue on homosexuality, is "one of the more wicked men in the University" when seen through Wasinger-colored glasses.

"He's leading his flock into the pit," Wasinger says.

The Black Students Association is "just...another political hack group," he says.