Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Deviant Behavior

Billy Hallowell reports that some students at Ohio's Franciscan University are in a snit about a course listing homosexuality as a "deviant behavior" along with drug addiction and criminal lifestyles:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/catholic-college-under-fire-for-listing-homosexuality-with-murder-rape-robbery-prostitution-in-course-description/

A little history for you kids: When I was a college freshman, in the 1980s, textbooks that were no longer required but were still recommended supplemental reading listed all forms of nonconformism, including an "arty" lifestyle, "voluntary communities" like missions and monasteries, and of course the then-innovative beatniks/hippies, as "deviant."

What "deviant" basically meant in the 1950s, which became "traditional" for the 1960s, was not lapping up every possible form of conspicuous consumption the lifestyle/fashion industry had to offer. It was like, okay, the poor sharecroppers, coal miners, and factory laborers don't look like Beaver Cleaver's TV family, and that's allowed because they are so poor they have no choice, and everybody else gets to feel sorry for them and try to offer them as many "nice things" as possible, for which they should be grateful...but when people are not poor and don't want to buy all these fashionable things and spend their days maintaining the fashionable image, that's deviant!

People my age don't write that way any more...but we read it, and we've survived.

I'm inclined to think that the university should really hammer on this idea that the oh-so-sensitive, oh-so-vocal "gay students" are "deviant." And force them to look at the history of this term. And force them to think about the built-in pitfalls of trying to make your neighbors agree with you--about anything, including any feelings they have about homosexuality--or be labelled "deviant."

Maybe the university should make the students mindful that, when I was born, left-wing political opinions still had a bit of the allure that "deviance" has for teenagers trying to distinguish themselves from their parents. And that actually helped the left wing.

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