Wednesday’s UNI column, “White male, white female: Keep it the way God intended” wasn’t intended to offend interracial couples on campus.

Boekmann’s piece was satirical; a conversation with him and his editor confirmed that.

The Northern Iowan received reactions similar to many of yours, so they published this clarification after the column ran in their paper:

“Columnist Trevor Boeckmann uses old arguments against interracial marriage to question current arguments against homosexual marriage.”

Somehow, we missed that piece, and we aren’t used to writing up explanatory notes of our own.

For that, I apologize. We’ll try to do better.

Hopefully we can all see that Boeckmann’s point is, as ridiculous as arguments against interracial relationships seem, and as terrible as they were in the past, arguments against same-sex relationships fail to hold water in the same ways.

Although he never mentions same-sex relationships in the column, the third-to-last paragraph was what helped me make up my mind: “Remember, the issue of interracial marriages isn’t about ‘equality’ or ‘equal rights,’ it is about an extremist group of God-denying liberals trying to advance an untested social experiment.”

Interracial marriages, while a “new” and controversial concept after the abolition of slavery, have been a “tested social experiment” for decades, right? Clearly, Boeckmann’s either living in another universe, or the Northern Iowan published a column originally written in the 1930s as a way of looking back at how far society’s come.

Whatever the case, Boeckmann isn’t talking about interracial marriages at all, but the “new” concept that ruffles feathers in society today: same-sex marriages.

If we don’t learn from history, we’re destined to repeat it, and, as Trevor points out, it seems we have.

Again, my sincerest apologies for making you feel singled out. The students who write, shoot and edit for the Daily generally don’t support racism, and, if it surfaces, we strive for intelligent debate within the newsroom to make sure an argument is based on sound logic. I apologize if you feel we’ve fallen below our standards, but I assure you we wouldn’t have published the column if we felt it was an attack on interracial couples.