Happy Valley gets giddy

Insight on the News, May 20, 2002 by Ellen Sorokin

A student group at Penn State University has sparked criticism for using student fees to pay a speaker who supports the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA).

"Would the university allow David Duke or Osama bin Laden to speak at an on-campus event? Obviously not," says William Devlin, president of the Urban Family Council in Philadelphia. "If they want to promote these pathologies, let them do it on their own dime, not on the backs of taxpayers of Pennsylvania. This has become an embarrassment."

The incident and others like it have so angered state Rep. John Lawless, a Democrat, that he called on the state Legislature to cut all funding to the school, located in the middle of the state in an area known as Happy Valley. As a result, the state House voted to cut nearly $10,000 from the university's appropriations budget, but the Senate rejected it.

The group, know as Womyn's Concerns, hired Patrick Califia Rice, a transsexual author of sadomasochistic books and a backer of NAMBLA, to speak in March at a women's-health conference. The three-day conference, funded with student-activity fees, also featured workshops on bisexuality, abortion and homosexual Disney characters.

"It's really embarrassing when I go home and hear people talk about these kinds of events at Penn State," said Rick Smith, 21, a business-logistics major and former member of the university's student government. "These types of events don't help our image at all."

But according to university spokesman Tysen Kendig, freedom of speech always comes first. "We have to be careful we're not infringing on a student's rights," Kendig says. "Protecting those rights is the most important thing to us."

The event is the latest in a string of incidents at Penn State that has enraged state legislators and local pro-family groups. In 2000, the same group held a festival named after a vulgar term for female genitalia, and in 2001 it organized an event called Sex Faire, which featured games designed to help students become more comfortable using sexual language. The group had wanted to operate a "Tent of Consent," a closed-off spot where students would have two minutes of consensual behavior. School officials nixed the idea.