|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
The Devils Advocate, long an opponent of Christianity, is aghast at the thought that the University of California has placed a ban on professor/student dating. Regulating sexual activity between consenting adults? Positively puritanical!
Have we so quickly forgotten that Ultimate Sexual Libertarian, that Moses-like Great Deliverer of the Masses from the shackles of “traditional values,” the One True Mediator of Morality, Sigmund Freud?
Apparently. According to the Associated Press, at UC “[T]here has always been an unwritten rule that getting involved with students is a bad idea, says Gayle Binion, chair of UC’s Academic Senate and a political science professor at UC Santa Barbara.”
Bad idea? The Devils Advocate worries that such a statement smacks of judgmentalism. Who is Gayle Binion to pretend to make such moral pronouncements?
Here’s a dilemma: Let’s say that somewhere in Austria about 50 years ago, Dr. Freud is teaching a class on “sexual freedom,” going on and on about the great damage that Christian elements have done to humanity. Words like “repression,” “controlling,” “misplaced guilt” and “narrow,” fairly fill the lecture hall.
So far, everything is like--so beautiful. As the term progresses, however Professor Freud casts his lecherous eye on one of his students with whom he desires a “mature consenting adult relationship.” The student is not interested (who would be?) at first, but eventually decides that it would be best to acquiesce, since compliance would guarantee a good course grade.
The DA now asks you to decide: Is the professor asking the student to “compromise” anything? No sir or ma’am, replies the DA. After all, should not the good Doctor be free to reject academic standards with the same assurance that he does the moral ones? Is not the one just as “arbitrary” as the other?
The Devils Advocate would never presume to place himself on an scholastic plane of equality with Dr. Freud, but he must ask: At the end of the day, is it not inevitable that sexual activity, yes, even between consenting adults, will be regulated by someone, somewhere, somehow? Apparently yes, says the University of California.
And also yes, says the Christian Bible which has been saying it for thousands of years and will continue to say it long after both the University of California and Sigmund Freud have been forgotten.