Posted on 08/28/2008 1:58:05 PM PDT by NYer
An article in Georgetown University's newspaper The Hoya welcomes the new director of its Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Questioning (LGBTQ) Resource Center and does some end zone celebration for our benefit. Georgetown, you may remember, is a university in the Jesuit Tradition. You'll be edified by the following details:
Jack Harrison (SFS '09), co-chair of GU Pride, also said he hopes to work closely with the new director in developing programming for the year. … Harrison said GU Pride is looking to launch efforts this year to make the campus more "trans-friendly" by working to provide bathrooms and better housing options for transgender individuals.
It's futile, as we all know, to point out the conflict between the Catholic view of the human person and Georgetown's LGBTQ enthusiasms. The university, for its part, views its Catholic heritage as a kind of mascotry, useful in the imagery of alumni loyalty but of no more consequence for its moral decision-making than the colors orange and black are for Princeton's. The Jesuits, for their part, have swung behind the grin-without-a-cat leadership of their Alice in Wonderland superiors, who insist the Society of Jesus is wholly in conformity to the Catholic Church except in doctrine, worship, and prayer. In sum, few persons in positions of authority are likely to see a transgender bathroom as inconsistent with Mystici Corporis, and fewer still are likely to care.
Yet Georgetown's trans-baths -- like the dental dams at Loyola Chicago -- serve as a particularly apt emblem of the university's own view of its mission. Gender identity is among the most basic elements of human self-awareness, and one of the fundamental tasks of education, beginning with a mother's first words to her child, is instruction in what it means to be a man or to be a woman. A society that fails to transmit these truths to its young hardly qualifies as a society at all. To announce that one's gender can remain an open question -- as an institution does by providing trans-friendly restrooms -- is an act of profound moral and intellectual defeatism. It amounts to saying that nothing important is knowable (whence nothing important is transmittable).
Think back to those crew-cut vets who attended Georgetown on the GI Bill in the late 1940s, and imagine that someone approached them with the prophecy that, within 60 years, GU would fund a LGBTQ center on campus and consider adding facilities for transgender students and faculty. Not only would they reject the prediction outright, not only would they be shocked and sickened at the thought, but they would very likely regard the person who made the forecast as having an unwholesome, even demented, imagination. Many would be angered at the malice behind the suggestion that such a capitulation were possible.
But for forty of those sixty years defeatism has been a distinguishing feature of the academy, and the moral universe of today's Georgetown undergrad would be largely unrecognizable to his grandfather. Some time ago, in reflecting on a report of consensual cannibalism (undertaken for erotic purposes), your Uncle Di suggested that a student in the Georgetown class of 2023 might end up eating her roommate, consensually, like a spider concluding her mating ritual. One might object vehemently to this prediction, but in so doing one would simply replicate the outraged incredulity we imputed to our 1940s vets at the prospect of dental dams and trans-baths. Morally, rationally, institutionally, nothing stands in the way of the progress to cannibalism that couldn't be brushed aside by a change in fashion. Given their indoctrination, the parents of 2023 are most likely to object to their children's dining on their roomy on the grounds of trans-fat ("I don't want you stewing Emily until she loses at least three kilos …"). Nutrition has been pulled into the vacuum left by metaphysics.
But perhaps you spotted the flaw in my argument. I referred to the "parents" of 2023, and it goes without saying that those who frequent GU's LGBTQ Center are unlikely to figure in this category. A culture of sterility is a contradiction in terms. Those who embrace Georgetown's enthusiasms most earnestly today can be counted on to provide no students for the future; conversely, those interested in exercising the reproductive right known as reproduction are by and large confident about which bathroom to enter. The future belongs to the fertile, demographers say, and while we can't predict what relics of a gentler past our children's children will find when they arrive on campus, a "trans-friendly bath in the Jesuit tradition" is unlikely to be among them.
Perhaps the ‘survivors’ of ‘23 will restore the time honored tradition of Georgetown. Until then ....
Why are any Christian parents paying for their children to attend Georgetown? Even assuming that it has some kind of okay educational programs, you can find that anywhere, cheaper.
Think back to those crew-cut vets who attended Georgetown on the GI Bill in the late 1940s
Heck, would any of us have even conceived of this happening even ten years ago, much less back in the immediate post World War II era?
Can I ask a stupid question, at least it’s stupid to the politically correct crowd. But, I thought that Trans-Gendered or Gender Identity confusion (whatever the technical term is) is in the DSM manual used by psychiatrists as an officially recognized mental condition.
I know that homosexuality was taken off the list of such disorders years ago, but bear with me. If the trans-gendered / gender confused people have an officially recognized mental/emotional condition, then why would a university adopt policies to enable an individual in what is a potentially harmful condition that he or she has?? How does this make any sense, legally, morally, or ethically???????
There is a generation that are pure in their own eyes, and yet is not washed from their filthiness.
Prov. 30:12
Two words: Political Correctness. Very sad people.
I don’t remember chapter and verse but: This is a generation that knoweth not God.
How is Georgetown really any different from the George Washington U., or the University of Maryland, for that matter? It's tempting to blame the Jebbies or the Church for the mess, but the fact is, it looks like they've abrogated all meaningful control.
Someone should sue Georgetown for false advertising. It's a secular school with a thin veneer of Catholicism, little more than a memory.
Now that's very informative! Anoreth is going to Central Piedmont Community College, which has men's and ladies' rooms (only) and a highly-regarded automotive technology program.
In the early 70's, a good friend (an Italian immigrant), surveyed the American landscape with the newly blossoming feminism and made a statement that I have never forgotten. He was a student of ancient civilizations. He pointed to those cultures, explaining that throughout history each time women (feminism) rose to power, they were soon followed by homosexuals demanding equal rights. Be it in Sparta, Rome, Athens or wherever, each time this happened, society collapsed. At the time he made this broad statement, I laughed. It wasn't long after, that I began to grimace as the reality of his prognastication turned into reality.
We’re waiting at present to see if we get a thick envelope, or a thin one, from a college you know about in eastern Ohio.
Good luck! One of Anoreth’s church friends, the Cuban boy who taught Bill to play drums, is going to Southern Piedmont CC this year, and hoping to get into that Ohio college next year after improving his SAT score. His brother will graduate in May ‘09.
He is right.
I argue about this with my bride sometimes, but when any civilization goes off the rails in the Natural Law department, a crash soon follows. Feminism of the type we have now is a symptom of that.
It will be interesting to see who picks up the pieces after the West falls.
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