Where a Roman Catholic deacon ponders the world
Follow Patheos
Catholic:
“It’s the same as saying that since Muslims and Jews don’t get along we should force them to live apart. Should we also have separate sex classes or separate sex parking lots?”
– Lawyer John H. Banzhaf, on CUA’s decision to return to single-sex dorms.
Evidently, he was serious.
Join the Discussions of the Year of Faith
Click here throughout the Year of Faith, as the Catholic Channel at Patheos.com invites Catholics of every age and stripe to share what they are gleaning and carrying away from this gift of timely focus.
Follow Patheos on
Copyright 2008-2013, Patheos. All rights reserved. Terms of Service | Patheos Privacy Policy | Site developed by Avalon Consulting, LLC
In rhetoric that’s a fallacy by false analogy. That is so stupid it’s funny…lol.
University of Notre Dame has always had single-six dorms.
Correction: single-sex dorms
It will be interesting to watch to see which way the parties go on this issue if it gets to legislation or lawsuits. Somehow I think this might be an easy prediction.
In the Act of Contrition, Catholics pray: “…and to avoid the near occasions of sin”.
Having the two genders live separate would go a long way to avoiding near occasions of sin.
I wonder how many Catholics actually say that prayer, much less understand it…
Maybe I’m a prude, but I liked living in a single sex dorm – especially the dorm that had the common shower room/restroom. I wouldn’t have liked walking down the hall in my bathrobe or pajamas if it had been a co-ed dorm.
I did live in a dorm that was co-ed by floor. We had our own bathrooms adjoining our rooms, so it wasn’t so bad. But I don’t think I’d want to live on the same floor as a bunch of messy, rowdy college boys.
When I say co-ed by floor, I mean segregated by floor. The building was co-ed, but each floor was single sex.
During my time as an undergrad in the late 80s and early 90s, I spent a year living in a mixed-gender floor and a single sex one. I found that the mixed-gender floor was actually much more civilized. There was relatively little intimacy among floormates, maybe one or two couples over the course of the year. We tended to treat each other almost as brothers and sisters and I found that the men tended to be on better behavior around them. The all guys floor I lived on the following year was, by contrast, Animal House. I can’t say there was a difference in the “hookup” rates either way. People did what they did and kept it fairly discrete, but I think the mixed dorm was better at teaching men how to relate to women as people.
If this meddlesome, busybody law professor doesn’t like single-sex dorms, then he can send his kids to a better school (by his lights)– one with hook-up dorms.
There may have been some who liked the co-ed dorms, but most of the info and stories I have heard or read make it clear many students hated being forcibly assigned to such–especially young women. Remember, the movement to create co-ed dorms was just part of the liberal social engineering by academic bureaucrats of the 60″s and 70′s. There was no huge groundwell for them by students of either sex–and especially none from parents.