Warning: This story is not appropriate for young readers.
By Jim Brown
A pro-family leader says a recent sex column printed by a student-run newspaper at the University of California-Berkeley contains the most offensive content he's ever seen in a campus publication.
Editors of campus newspapers are sometimes known for “pushing the envelope” or bending the rules governing wisdom and good taste. But according to Bob Knight of the Culture and Family Institute, one column in the Daily Californian goes well beyond that.
In her “Sex for Tuesday” column, Andrea Desmarais gives fellow students graphic advice on oral and anal sex techniques. Knight says the content was of the sort one would find in an X-rated pornographic magazine.
The pro-family spokesman says the tasteless column is the sort of thing that makes one long for leaders like former Senator S.I. Hayakawa, a one-time UC professor who Knight says “pulled the plug” on loudspeakers that were disrupting his campus in California in the 1980s.
Knight hopes the current administration will adopt a similar attitude. “I think the chancellor of UC-Berkeley ought to come down hard on this newspaper and say 'Look, we're believers in free speech, but this isn't free speech. This is obscene.' This isn't about higher education — it's about going into the gutter,” he says.
Knight says the sex column may even meet the criteria of the legal definition of obscenity. He bemoans the moral climate at Berkeley, quoting a well-known Christian author.
“G.K. Chesterton [said] when real religion is expelled from the public arena, then materialism takes its place, and sex becomes its highest ritual. In other words, sex replaces religion as the pursuit of people. You'd have to conclude that at Berkeley sex is the new religion, and it trumps everything else, including a sense of decency,” Knight says.
UC-Berkeley Chancellor Robert Berdahl would not comment on the column, except to say the Daily Californian is an independent publication and therefore does not receive university funding.
(This article courtesy of Agape Press).
