Most of the concerns articulated by Fern Kupfer in her Monday editorial were eminently reasonable.

However, Kupfer failed to address exactly how her chosen response — namely, a sudden push for enforcement of the historically discussed “overoccupancy” ordinance — would address these concerns.

For instance, loud parties are by their nature a temporary and transitory phenomenon; they may just as easily take place in a house permanently occupied by three people as in a dwelling inhabited by five.

And the incidence of reckless driving has absolutely nothing to do with the density of a neighborhood — or, dare I say it, with student status!

More than once, I’ve looked over at the Lexus SUV blasting past me at 55 mph on Lincoln Way to find that its occupant is a phone-distracted yuppie older than my parents.

Yet neither the city of Ames, nor its self-styled Campustown alderwoman has seen fit to attribute a passel of social ills to the stress brought on by soccer moms’ overoccupied basement rec rooms.

Moreover, there is something rather disturbing about Kupfer’s claim that students living in low-density neighborhoods have an obligation to “respect a family lifestyle” (whatever that may mean) because of the majority presence of families.

Would she argue a right to ban students from smoking on their decks and porches, lest the evil vapors work a Pavlovian seduction on neighborhood children?

If applied more broadly, would such a construction require all gays and lesbians to move out of conservative Pella if they wished to live with their partners?

While America is indeed a representative republic which conducts plurality elections, majority rule is only a principle of politics — not of social or cultural life. To expand the power of the majority into these latter realms is to undercut the very same individual freedoms which our political system was designed to defend.

So long as an activity (even a party involving alcohol) is being conducted with minimal actual interference to neighboring residents and within the bounds of existing law, majority opinion alone is not a tenable rationale for its prohibition.

Of course, it would be silly to suggest that there are no noise or alcohol disturbances in Campustown; I wish only to make the point that law enforcement becomes the appropriate venue for relief only when specific individuals exceed defined legal boundaries, and not beforehand.

It is fundamentally unfair to target completely innocent individuals under the rationale of a proximate cause, especially one whose actual causality is shaky at best.

Basic principles of justice require the government (whether in the guise of administration or law enforcement) sanction only those who are demonstrably guilty of a crime.

Anything else — for instance, overoccupancy ordinances predicated upon the prediction that too many students might make trouble — smacks of social engineering based upon the whims of a governing majority.

Reilly Liebhard

Senior

Political Science