Jonathan Zimmerman: Rooting for BYU's Sex Ban
[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and lives in Narberth. He is the author of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory" (Yale University Press). He can be reached at jlzimm@aol.com.]
I did not attend Brigham Young University, and I'd be shocked if either of my teenage daughters decided to go there. But Brandon Davies did decide to attend BYU, where every student signs an annual pledge to refrain from premarital sex. And, as every sports fan now knows, Davies broke it....
...I like BYU's decision to suspend Davies for [this] reason: diversity.
Remember diversity? My fellow liberals love diversity. We want diversity in our neighborhoods, diversity in our workplaces, diversity in our classrooms....
By diversity, we usually mean representation of different races and ethnicities, and sometimes of different genders and sexual orientations. But that leaves out religion, which never really made it into the multicultural pantheon.
And that's too bad, because religion is intimately linked to all the other identities. A Catholic Hispanic woman isn't Hispanic on Monday, female on Tuesday, and Catholic on Wednesday. She is all those things all the time. So if we care about diversity, we should defend and develop all three....
Read entire article at Philadelphia Inquirer
I did not attend Brigham Young University, and I'd be shocked if either of my teenage daughters decided to go there. But Brandon Davies did decide to attend BYU, where every student signs an annual pledge to refrain from premarital sex. And, as every sports fan now knows, Davies broke it....
...I like BYU's decision to suspend Davies for [this] reason: diversity.
Remember diversity? My fellow liberals love diversity. We want diversity in our neighborhoods, diversity in our workplaces, diversity in our classrooms....
By diversity, we usually mean representation of different races and ethnicities, and sometimes of different genders and sexual orientations. But that leaves out religion, which never really made it into the multicultural pantheon.
And that's too bad, because religion is intimately linked to all the other identities. A Catholic Hispanic woman isn't Hispanic on Monday, female on Tuesday, and Catholic on Wednesday. She is all those things all the time. So if we care about diversity, we should defend and develop all three....