Jason McCabe
RHET 1302-018
September 20, 2005
Divinity and Pornography

In this article the author, Dennis Prager, criticizes the University of Harvard for forcing the resignation of Harvard Dean Thiemann for viewing pornographic material on his Harvard computer. Many of the reasons for the pressure applied to Dean Thiemann do not make logical since and seem to be non sequitur arguments made to defend a illogical and unjust decision. Prager picks apart each argument and finds the fallacies in each. In the process’s he calls into question the definition of many terms including a persons right to privacy and heterophobia. A persons right to privacy is a definition of what things a person does are private and which are public information. Prager defines this through an analogy basically stating that since the Supreme Court declares that a woman has a right to privacy when she has an abortion, which affects her and her unborn child, than a man should have the same right of privacy concerning him viewing pornography on a computer, which only affects him. One other definition the author gives is heterophobia, which he describes as “the fear and loathing of male sexuality”. (521) Prager backs up his definition of hetrophobia by giving an example of if Dean Thiemann was a homosexual with naked men on his computer than he would have no have been asked to resign. Cries of homophobia would come from all directions at Harvard if that was the case. He continues on stating that society today is trying to change the male persona in the image of females. I do not think it is going that far, but the fact that a good man was asked to leave Harvard just because of some pornography upsets me and makes me worried of how judgmental and hypocritical society can be today. In conclusion, Dennis Prager did a fabulous job at defining the right of privacy in American and heterophobia. Also, he completely and systematically proved all the reasons Harvard gave as to why Dean Thiemann was asked to leave as illogical.