Tuesday, February 3, 2009

When the Kids Have to Educate the "Grown-ups"

Here is a heartening story from the excellent new on-line journal Public Discourse about the founding of the Anscombe Society at Princeton University. Undergraduates there have decided that the lame and degenerate sexual education provided by the university administration needs correction, so they have taken it upon themselves to attack the problem with organizational skill, intellectual vigor and the employment of reason in defense of traditional marriage. Here is how it begins:

"Every fall, kids arrive on college campuses and learn that their basic moral intuitions on sexual matters don’t square with the reigning ideas. Thanks to debased campus culture and overreaching on the part of administrators and professors, students are beginning to respond systematically—and they’re having an impact. Here’s how."

Read it all here:http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/viewarticle.php?selectedarticle=2009.02.03.001.pdart

Here is a link to the Anscombe Society: http://www.princeton.edu/~anscombe/default.htm

My favorite part is in the "About" section where they explain why they chose to name their society after Gertrude Elizabeth Anscombe. A Cambridge philosophy professor, literary executor of Ludwig Wittgenstein and mother of seven, she once bested C. S. Lewis in a debate at the Socratic Club and he had to revise a chapter of his book, Miracles, as a result. She was once arrested for protesting outside an abortion clinic in the 1970's. But it is a toss up whether I admire her most for her outstanding essay "Contraception and Chastity" or for her protest of Oxford University's decision to award an honorary doctorate to Harry S. Truman despite the fact that it was he who ordered the atomic attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Clearly, she did not fear to swim upstream and she took her Christian faith seriously.

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