Campus Polly-tics

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 14, 2001 | by Andrea Billups

Is political correctness alive and well on America's college campuses? You bet, say students who every year nominate the most outrageous examples for `Polly Awards.'

Peter Singer, the Princeton University professor whose research has outraged right-to-life supporters and activists for the disabled, continues gage in eyebrow-raising scholarship. Some of the bioethicist's latest writing appears on a soft-pornography Website where he defends the findings of a new book on bestiality.

For this, Singer and Princeton have taken top honors in the fourth annual Polly Awards, bestowed by the Wilmington, Del.-based Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) for outrageous examples of political correctness (PC) on college campuses. Students nationwide are invited each year to nominate the most flagrant episodes of PC run amok.

In his review of Midas Dekkers' Dearest Pet: On Bestiality, posted on the Website Nerve.com, Singer "carries his campaign against human dignity to a new low," claim ISI officials. The Australian-born scholar writes "that our physical similarities with other mammals -- mostly genital -- are so strong that the taboo on bestiality stems not from physical differences but from our desire to differentiate ourselves, erotically and in every other way, from animals." Concludes Singer, "Who has not been at a social occasion disrupted by the household dog gripping the legs of a visitor and vigorously rubbing its penis against them? In private not everyone objects to being used by her or his dog in this way, and occasionally mutually satisfying activities may develop."

Other 2001 Polly winners include:

* The University of Oregon. A student chapter of the Animal Liberation Front, which has offices on campus, publishes a newspaper, The Insurgent, paid for with student fees. In the Dec. 8, 2000, edition, the paper included an eight-page insert with a detailed guide on "economic sabotage" geared at liberating laboratory-research animals through vandalism and arson. "First, you may want to decide what kind of establishment you want to target -- a fur shop, a butcher shop, a factory farm or slaughterhouse, or maybe a fast-food restaurant," notes the insert, which included detailed instructions on gluing locks, vandalizing vehicles and clogging toilets. The guide also included the names and home addresses of professors who perform animal research.

* State University of New York at Albany. The school is home to the state's first college-funded sadomasochism club, the Power Exchange, founded by two students with no objections from the administration, ISI official say.

* Temple University. Student Michael Marcavage protested against a campus theatrical presentation of Jesus as a homosexual. He complained to university officials and asked to put on his own dramatic counterproduction based on traditional Christian teachings. When he later met with administrators and learned they were canceling his play for reasons that are under dispute, Marcavage became upset. In a lawsuit against Temple, he claims that when he tried to leave the meeting he was handcuffed and taken to the Temple University Hospital psychiatric ward, where doctors later said there was no medical reason to detain him.

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