Alfonzo Rachel - Liberal To-Vowitarianism: Huffington Post Pundit Says No Marriage for Anyone Under 25

he Huffington Post's Jennifer Nagy recently wrote that nobody under the age of 25 should be allowed to get married. Is this just another liberal double-standard? Find out.

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Mike Adams - The Needle and the Damage Done

Last semester, I was giving a lecture on the history of the Supreme Court from 1953 to present. Toward the end of the lecture, I asked my students if they could name the current Chief Justice. None were able to do so. There were thirty students in the class. This was in a college classroom, mind you.

I was annoyed by the failure of a single student to know the name of one of the three most powerful men in America. But, whenever annoyed, I have a tendency to make jokes to lighten the atmosphere. So I told my students to go to the SCOTUS website next time they were in the tattoo parlor and had a couple of spare hours to surf the internet on their iPhone. They laughed and then I casually asked “How many of you have tattoos?” About twenty students raised their hands, which was far more than I expected.

Asking that question was a big mistake. The next time I walked into class, a young man was asking a sorority girl where her tattoo was located. She lifted up the back of her shirt and showed him a giant tramp stamp across her lower back. It was as sad as it was surprising. Apparently blond hair, blue eyes, and natural beauty aren’t enough to attract college boys these days. She needs a tattoo to let him know that his chances of getting sex on the first date are close to 100%.

Over the last few years, tattoo parlors have been popping up like weeds here in Wilmington. I have always assumed that their popularity was easily explained: Young people just want to draw attention and tattoos give them something to show off. They are just another way of helping young people feel different. Even if most kids have them, theirs can be unique. They can even tell a story.

But the narcissistic and short-sighted component of tattoo accumulation is just half the story. I had an epiphany about the other half of the story as I was talking to a woman we will call Brooke. We’re going to call her Brooke because that really is her name. Brooke was complaining to two of her friends (who are also my friends). She was complaining about the thing single women complain about most often: the boyfriend who won’t respect her even though (maybe because?) she is sleeping with him regularly.

Brooke’s complaint with her boyfriend was that he desired to stay in her bed after they were finished having “fun.” This TMI moment was topped off by a deep philosophical argument: “My bed is an intimate place. Until we’re married, he’s not welcomed there overnight. That’s just too presumptuous. It’s too intrusive.”

Translation: You can have my body but not my bed. The former is of less value to me. Some will say it’s just one anecdote. Of course, it is. But it is part of a larger pattern I am seeing among younger adults. Like virtually all other unhealthy aspects of our culture, it is being nurtured in the university setting. Thinking about these three campus cultural trends will add some perspective:

*Sexual experimentation is encouraged by the administration. Free condoms are available, free birth control is often available. Students are taught to give themselves away and that the only concern is that they remain physically healthy enough to continue to do so.

*Abortion is strongly encouraged on campuses - often to the unconstitutional exclusion of competing ideas. Use of RU 486, which is a dangerous toxin causing the death (and then expulsion) of the unborn, is encouraged. Rarely is there an intelligent discussion of the drug’s harmful side effects.

*Genital mutilation is promoted as a means of increasing diversity. College students – even as young as 18 - are encouraged to resolve sexual confusion with the blade of a knife. This permanent disfigurement of their genitalia is simply another form of sexual expression. It’s no longer stigmatized. It’s celebrated!

There is a dangerous undercurrent here. It is obvious that immediate gratification appeals to young people. But it is compounded by something that is lacking. And what is lacking here is any sense that we as humans are made in the image of God – and that our bodies, therefore, have some intrinsic value. If we were still willing to nurture that idea in our culture – and allowed to do so by the Supreme Court - these trends would not be engulfing us and destroying our children.

Tattoos are a lot like guns. Soon after you get one, you want another. But unlike guns the tattoo always leaves a permanent mark. Whenever the desire to cover one’s body with ink sets in, one thing is clear: there is a void in one’s soul that desperately needs filling. Like all such voids it is of a spiritual nature and cannot be filled by physical things. At its core, every desire we experience is really a longing for God.

I should not be surprised that so many of our children are covering themselves with ink. They have been separated from transcendent meaning. Now they must create meaning for themselves in order to fill that void. Too often, they try to recreate themselves altogether. And they mask their God-given beauty in the process.

Mike Adams

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Mike Adams

Mike Adams is a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and author of Feminists Say the Darndest Things: A Politically Incorrect Professor Confronts "Womyn" On Campus.

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Mike Adams - The Right to be Governed

There are a number of differences between the college students of the 1960s and the college students of today. Perhaps none is more striking than the desire of the former to be free and the latter to be controlled by the university administration. A recent controversy at UNC-Chapel Hill shows just how upset students become when administrators tell them they are free to associate with whomever they choose.

The controversy began like so many controversies begin on college campuses. A homosexual student joined a group that did not share his views on homosexuality. When he was predictably removed from the group he launched a campus-wide controversy that required the intervention of the university administration in order to answer a fundamental constitutional question. In this case, the question was: Did a Christian group, Psalm 100, have a right to expel a homosexual because his views on homosexuality were deemed incompatible with the group’s stated beliefs?

The university is getting much undeserved credit for arriving at the right decision in saying the group was within its rights to expel the homosexual. The truth of the matter is that the university only got this one half right. The part they got wrong was their suggestion that the group would have been violating the student’s rights had they expelled him for his “sexual orientation” rather than his beliefs about sexual orientation. This is a dangerous position with implications few people have considered fully. It is an issue that cannot be avoided as institutions continue to substitute the word “orientation” for behavior – a sleight of hand that is both intentional and highly significant.

Imagine for a moment that a similar issue arose within another religious organization – this time a church located off campus. Imagine the specifics involved a youth leader who was living out of wedlock with his girlfriend. The church would be well within its rights if it determined that he should step down because his sexual behavior conflicted with the teachings of the church. Nor should such a right be limited to decisions involving church leadership. The church could just as well expel a member for having an open affair with the spouse of another church member. The behavior would be an affront to the teachings of the church and should be handled within the church. The fact that the church receives tax breaks would in no way invite the government into the conflict.

Nor should it matter if the youth leader had been living with his boyfriend in an open homosexual relationship. Although the term sexual orientation would then be invoked – replacing the term “sexual behavior” - it should make no difference to the government. It is not their business. Nor would it change things if the church decided to expel a non-leading member for the same reason.

So how has the government become so involved in governing the affairs of student religious organizations at state-run institutions? The answer lies in the operation of the mandatory student fee system at public universities. Because the government charges fees to all students – even those having no desire to join such groups – it has assumed the role of controlling their inner workings all the way down to dictating the scope of their religious beliefs and their membership policies.

But is the act of taking student money and then returning it only in exchange for control over membership requirements really justified? And does it pass constitutional muster when those organizations are religious in nature?

Those who answer in the affirmative must somehow distinguish between the on-campus and off-campus religious organization if they are to justify controlling the membership of the former but not the latter. They do so by pointing out that churches only receive tax breaks whereas campus organizations seek to obtain supplemental funding for their religious exercise. But that is a distinction without a difference. Those supplemental funds came initially out of the students’ pockets. They are never fully recovered. What is called a mandatory fee is nothing but a direct tax on religious freedom.

Students should be opposed to these mandatory fees for at least three reasons:

1. They raise the cost of education. My university charges nearly one-thousand dollars per semester in these fees. The fee is clearly unjustified.
2. The fees are siphoned off to pay the salaries of university administrators who control reallocation. But they do not fully cover the salaries of those administrators. Thus, they place a burden on taxpayers – even those not attending the universities. And that is wrong.
3. Finally, they give the university a ready justification to control student religious expression as well as student freedom of association.

The UNC-Chapel Hill student newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel, agrees with my assertion that the university only got the recent Psalm 100 controversy half right. But the part I thought the university got wrong is the part the newspaper thought they got right. In other words, the Daily Tar Heel asserts that the university has the right to prevent religious groups from removing people for their sexual behavior or for their beliefs about sexual behavior.

It is certainly odd that the generation that once protested for more freedom has now taken over the university. It is odder still that they have convinced students to give them money to help them take away the basic freedoms they once championed. To the extent that today’s student protests, he says he wants them to take more. He thus asserts the right to be governed instead of the right to be free.

Mike Adams

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Mike Adams

Mike Adams is a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and author of Feminists Say the Darndest Things: A Politically Incorrect Professor Confronts "Womyn" On Campus.

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