With slideshow: Tea Party members, protesters disagree at Tax Day rally on the Diag

April 15 is the due date for income tax returns. Among the core tenets of the Tea Party movement are the beliefs that the American people have been overtaxed, that federal spending is unsustainable at current levels, and that younger generations will be saddled with debt if nothing changes.

"I'm here for my eight grandchildren more than anything," said Rhonda Thompson of Pittsfield Township. "If we keep spending the way we are, there's not going to be much left for them."

Thompson, a nurse, said that at a time when family budgets and corporate budgets are being slashed, politicians in Washington, D.C. should learn to do more with less. Like several tea partiers interviewed by AnnArbor.com, Thompson said she never took to the streets in protest before health care reform came on the radar.

But while this year's Tea Party saw much greater attendance than last year's - 500 people versus 150 last year - a lot of its growth had to do with the counter-protesters that decided to join the party.

After the Ann Arbor Tea Party Patriots announced they'd be staging a Tax Day rally on the Diag, the College Democrats at the University of Michigan announced a counterprotest to "Defend the M" at the center of the Diag against the Tea Party movement.

"It is our turn to defend the values of equality, justice, and rationality the University of Michigan is historically known for," reads Defend the M's Facebook page. "Join us as we rally in support of President Obama and against the racist, bigoted fringe of the Tea Party protests."

But that fringe was nowhere to be found on Tax Day.

The whole point of the counterprotest was to undermine the Tea Party protest. Defend the M got to the Diag an hour before the Tea Party began and appeared to outnumber tea partiers by about three to one.

Several counter-protesters specifically mentioned their desire to take a stand against the tea parties.

Said Zoe Iris, a student in the U-M Residential College at East Quad: "Ann Arbor is a liberal town, and this is a liberal university. We had to make sure our views were heard as well."

Diane Brown, spokeswoman for the U-M Department of Public Safety, said that despite the dueling protests, there was no violence and no law enforcement action taken.

In other words, both sides pretty much agreed to disagree.

In the hour before the rally, both groups kept a safe distance from one another, with tea partiers congregating near the steps of the Hatcher Graduate Library and Defend the M protestors gathering closer to the north-side benches.

Even when the Tea Party's speakers took the stage, counter-protesters would scream rebuttals - just as supporters shouted encouragement - but never tried to shout the speakers down.

Prior to the rally, a U-M staffer read a statement from the U-M Dean of Students Office, encouraging civility and the right of both sides to speak. Interfering with a speaker's ability to communicate could result in a warning for the first offense and removal on the second, the statement warned. It never got to that point.

Stephen Ross, chairman of the Southeast Michigan 9/12 Project, a Tea Party group, said he welcomed the presence of student protesters.

"This is exactly what we've been denied too long in America - a real dialogue about what we want and don't want our government to do," Ross said.

Images from Thursday night's Tea Party protest on the University of Michigan Diag.

James David Dickson can be reached at JamesDickson@AnnArbor.com.