Column mistakes traditional sexual practice
Regarding ‘Double standards on a divided campus,’ (Monday, Feb. 18, 2008):
You know your political cause is in a rut when the best example of political oppression against your group involves a voluntary ...(back to the article)
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This letter is astonishingly bad, and I don't think Tim Nunan made any attempt to make it make sense. It's extraordinarily offensive that Nunan links Nava's psychotic behavior to conservative students in general. Don't forget that it was the conservative students who exposed Nava, not the other way around. If they had wanted to benefit from the Nava incident, they would have kept quiet. This article's attempt at history is pathetic. To correct some basic errors: Alfred Kinsey's "Sexual Behavior and the Human Male" report is not exactly considered authoritative, as 25% of those interviewed were prison inmates, 5% were male prostitutes, and the study also included data obtained by the sexual abuse of children as young as five. Nunan also gets it wrong when he contemplates the philosophic tradition that influences the Anscombe Society. I'm pretty sure Hadley arkes is Jewish, not Catholic, and the Society's namesake, Elizabeth Anscombe, was a brave female voice in a field dominated by males (analytic philosophy), whose tradition stretched back to Wittgenstein and Frege, to Aquinas, and to the beginnings of western philosophy. This information is easily available to Nunan, and the fact that he gets it so wrong suggests he really doesn't care about accuracy here -- he'd much rather just smear the Anscombe Society. Incredibly dishonorable. For fun, let's put the inaccuracies aside, and consider Nunan's argument: (A) our concepts of gender and sexual orientation are disputed; (B) human beings are sexual creatures (C) sexual behavior and misbehavior has been around since the beginning. From these premises, Nunan gives us the conclusions that (1) the cause of sexual ethics is a hopeless one, and (2) the view that sexuality has a right and a wrong way of going about it, is non-traditional and non-moral. Tim, give me a break. Your conclusions simply don't follow. There is an Anscombian tradition and there's a gay pride tradition. They're not necessarily opposed to each other, but you can't say that one of them is traditional and the other is not. On some levels, they are competing traditions, but that's as far as you can take the point.
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I thought the "centers" were for minorities marginalized by intrinsic barriers. Religious and political views are acquired characteristics and if people are passionate about their cause, they should start student organizations. I, for instance, would love for there to be a center for atheists where I can express my opinions without being discriminated against!
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Alexander: they don't want a center because if they got one then they couldn't (falsely) portray themselves as an embattled minority anymore. Besides, don't all those church organizations we have count as a 'center'? Murray-Dodge? Does it need to be in Frist to count?
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go tim!
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