On April 7, 2003, then-Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum gave an infamous interview with the Associated Press in which he backhandedly compared homosexual sex to “man-on-dog” bestiality. The interview cemented Santorum’s place in history as a culture warrior to some, a bigot to others.

At the same time, the Roman Catholic Senator had been chosen to give the graduation commencement speech at St. Joseph’s University on City Line Avenue in Northwestern Philadelphia. After news of Santorum’s interview spread—in which he also blamed the recent exposure of Catholic priest rape and torture on “liberalism” and “moral relativism”—a group of St. Joe’s students attempted to get him removed from their graduation. They were at first blown off.

Eventually, as 2003 graduate and current adjunct professor of English at SJU Andrew Panebianco remembers, “[The school] gave us the opportunity to silently and politely express our dissatisfaction [at the commencement].” Many students showed up to the ceremony with placards reading “No More Rick in 2006″ and “No to Santorum.” A gay rights group on campus handed out rainbow tassels to those students who wanted them, too.

Panebianco hadn’t planned to even show up.

“The truth is, I didn’t really give a shit about graduation. That’s just a ceremony, and I just really wanted the diploma,” he says, “but when they said this guy is going to come I thought, ‘Well, this is really lame. This guy is somehow representative of my education? He is who this school I spent four years at, he is who they would think to invite? This medieval-minded guy?’”

The media had learned of some students’ dissatisfaction with Santorum and many showed up for the ceremony.

Before Santorum’s speech began, according to a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article from the time, about one-in-eight students walked out to both cheers and boos. The ceremony was separated by school – Arts and Sciences on one side, Business on the other. According to Panebianco, most of the students walking out before the speech were on the Arts and Sciences side. He would have walked out, too, he says, but had different plans.

A social liberal at a Catholic university, Panebianco saw the situation in one way: “We had fought against him coming, and he had come anyway.”

With that in mind, he decided to do something a bit radical. “I’d talked to my girlfriend at the time and she said, ‘You have to do something about it.’ I said, ‘I wish I could just go up there with a big rainbow.’”

And that’s what he did. Panebianco’s then-girlfriend sewed long rainbow-color panels down the front and back of his gown on the inside.

When they called his name, he got up, flipped the gown inside-out and walked down the aisle, clad in rainbow colors. “The Arts and Sciences class was mostly in favor,” he says. However, the Business side mostly stayed seated.

He got on stage, shook the dean’s hand, then blew the senator a kiss. “He (Santorum) looked at me, horrified,” Panebianco says.

In October 2003, Mother Jones Magazine would name St. Joseph’s University one of the Top 10 Activist campuses in the world on its annual list. “Boring commencement speakers are a rite of passage,” the magazine stated. “But nearly 100 newly minted graduates from this Catholic university in Philadelphia decided that a bigoted speaker — Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, who in April earned himself a place alongside Trent Lott by comparing gay sex to bigamy, incest, and polygamy — deserved a walkout. St. Joe’s students wore gay-pride rainbow tassels on their mortarboards and were joined by 30 faculty members as they commenced to walk on Santorum’s speech.”

“It was a big deal to me,” says Panebianco, “that that guy was going to come and have some kind of message for me on my graduation, like that guy’s got anything I want to listen to. But I think, and I probably think this more now than I did then, because back then, I was just angry and looking for an opportunity to thumb my nose at something. But I didn’t think it was that much of a story…But now he might be president. It’s different now. I don’t think he has a prayer [to become president], but Jesus Christ, I thought we were done with this guy. I don’t understand why the kind of crap that he’s pedaling, why they call it social conservatism. Why don’t they just call it hate, divisiveness and fear; a 1950s worldview? It’s the 21st Century. It just doesn’t make sense to me.”