PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) – A women’s group at Rhode Island College is suing the school, saying its free speech rights were violated when campus police took down signs bearing the message “Keep Your Rosaries Off Our Ovaries.”

The Women’s Studies Organization posted the signs near a campus entrance last December to coincide with a day of activism for women’s rights. But police removed the signs within a few hours after a priest on his way to conduct a weekly Mass observed them and alerted the president of the public college, the students said.

The president, John Nazarian, then ordered the signs taken down, according to a federal lawsuit filed Monday on behalf of the students by the Rhode Island branch of the American Civil Liberties Union.

“The issue is this is a public university, and a public university can’t abridge anyone’s free speech rights – including the students,” said Jennifer Azevedo, an ACLU volunteer attorney.

The group had been negotiating with the college over the signs in the past year, but had been unable to resolve the problem and decided to sue, said Nichole Aguiar, the organization’s president and a plaintiff in the lawsuit.

The complaint seeks unspecified damages and asks a judge to declare the college’s acts unconstitutional. It also challenges a policy on campus signs that the group says was recently adopted and is being selectively enforced.

College spokeswoman Jane Fusco said signs are typically prohibited in the place the women’s group wanted to put them.

She also said the college requires signs to be tied to a specific event or program on campus, and that administrators didn’t believe there was a program connected to the message.

“The college was not objecting to the use of the signs or the message the signs carried,” Fusco said. “The college was concerned about the location of the signage and that, at the time, it didn’t have a program associated with it.”

But the women’s group said it advised the college that the signs were part of an event they were planning.

An anti-abortion student group at the college, RIC 4 Life, released a statement Monday calling the signs from the women’s organization offensive and disrespectful. It said it would continue working “to educate the RIC community about the gift of life.”

The signs were part of an event that was planned amid complaints that some pharmacists had refused to fill prescriptions for emergency contraception because of personal convictions, Aguiar said.

After police removed the signs, the complaint says, Nazarian told the students there was additional approval required and that only college-made signs were allowed in that location. But the students say they had previously been told they had all the necessary clearance, and that the entrance area had been used over the years to display a variety of signs and messages.

The students again tried to hang the signs last winter and spring. The college denied their request in February and on several subsequent dates, according to the complaint.

In September, the college adopted a formal policy that generally restricts signs from being posted at the college’s entrances, the complaint says. But critics say the policy is not being evenly enforced since campaign signs promoting political candidates were posted there during election season.

Fusco said the college’s sign policy was not new but was simply being rigorously enforced. She also said campaigns were allowed to bring their own signs to political debates hosted by the school but always had to take them down afterward.

“It’s certainly inappropriate to say certain types of issues are OK for signs and others are not,” said local ACLU executive director Steven Brown.

AP-ES-12-04-06 1750EST