To the editor:

In response to the letters from James Long, Mark Davis, Nathan Swanson and Peris Chamberlain decrying the Daily’s coverage of LGBTAA’s Awareness Days 2000, I must take the position of defending the Daily.

The Daily’s editors may be oblivious, as when they ignored a near-riot and car-flipping in the Buchanan parking lot. However, they cannot be blamed for publishing a picture of two men kissing.

I doubt these four would be writing letters of protest if the picture had been of a male and female student kissing. Therefore, either the photo was blatantly offensive, or the writers are hyper-sensitive on the matter. Let’s look at the picture.

From that angle, the chap on the left looks rather delicate and could be a girl. The one on the right looks quite male, so there’s no hint of a lesbian kiss.

Had the one on the left been identified as a female student, would anyone have known, unless he knew the two personally? It’s unlikely, which means the horrified reaction the four writers suffered was due to their own imaginations. In other words, they put a lot of effort into being offended.

Now personally, I am disgusted and repelled by sodomy, both heterosexual and homosexual. However, if I see a male and female kissing, I don’t immediately think “Oh my gods, a couple who are about to engage in stomach-wrenching acts of oral lovemaking” even though odds are, if they do wind up in bed, there will be more than a bit of that. No, that is a mental place to which I do not go if I can possibly help it. So long as there aren’t unavoidable public images of it, I can live with almost everybody else being a pervert.

Long, Davis, Swanson and Chamberlain should copy my method. As far as Chamberlain’s contention that “Judeo-Christianity is moral” goes, let me point out that the God of the Old Testament is a baby-killing tyrant with a circular definition of morality. Combine the worst elements of a political dictator and a spoiled-rotten 5-year-old and you get the God who murders Egyptian babies to make a point. Pro-life arguments, anyone?

Anyway, as a great ethical philosopher once said, “If I have to choose between your god, and my friend, I choose my friend.”

Roger J.M. Hughes

Senior

English