Bending Over Backwards

Much to the dismay of the cult of reactionary conservatism on campus, the Undergraduate Council recently came out in support of co-educational housing. On open-lists across the campus— but especially that of The Harvard Salient (that bastion of reason!)—aflame conservatives have predictably christened the move as a step toward eternal damnation. The College, they argue, should not approve such a policy because its ‘sinfulness’, in the words of one e-mail, would compromise the school.

For Harvard’s conservatives, this episode is a blatant manifestation of sex-crazed juveniles and The Homosexual Agenda Inc. (Those crazy gays! They’re taking over the world!) They seem to think that the only reason a guy and a girl might want to live together is for a) incessant, vigorous sex or b) in order to topple civilization. Call me radical, but I find arguments against this legislation extraordinarily easy to dismantle, as they are, for the most part, based upon archaic Biblical fealty to Sodom and Gomorrah, fire and brimstone (Those crazy gays! It’s the new semitism!)

There are those who would have you believe that the integration of housing will induce moral decline, inspiring students to gleefully abandon their moral scruples and their virginities. This is based on the premise that people room in order to have sex with each other. But in the real world, students room for friendship and company. They, unlike conservatives, agree to not make sex an issue.

But even if people chose to room in order to bonk each other day and night, conservatives have no right to coerce individuals who disagree from their moral perspective.

Which is why, thankfully, this is a view held by the slim minority of the students on campus. And it seems to emerge from their religious beliefs. These are the same people, who, a month ago, were crying bloody murder over the violent Muslim reaction to the Danish cartoons. Muslims, they huffed, were imposing their backward dogmas on the liberal West. It turns out Harvard’s conservatives are just as imposing and just as medieval. The irony, as the writer Arundhati Roy once put it, is enough to make a skull smile.

Students need to be able to determine for themselves—sans arbitrary, unjustified supervision—the rooming situation with which they are the most comfortable. The current housing system is a vestige of a medieval era in which a puritanical society forced men and women into largely unrepresentative and dichotomous roles that serve poorly to determine rooming compatibility.

On that note, many students on campus already live with members of the opposite gender. These industrious few may have jumped the requisite political hurdles or perhaps have even come up with creative solutions of their own. It makes more sense for the administration to legitimate co-educational housing so that students who wish to pursue such a living situation do not feel compelled to break to rules to make it happen.

Naturally, this debate would be nothing without the portion of the student body perpetually afraid of the homosexual political agenda, of which the proposed policy change is a clear manifestation. There is little I can say or do to ease these phobias, except to add—perhaps in jest—that the new initiative to allow men and women to room together would be a promotion of heterosexuality, while the current system of same-sex rooming seems the gayest of all.

At its core, this issue is a no-brainer: a waste of ink and paper and space. Students deserve the freedom of choice to decide who their roommates are, whether their decisions are compatible with the norms of the Christian minority or not.

James H. O’Keefe ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Grays Hall.