I consider it my duty as member of the Brown community to respond to Bill O'Reilly's criticism of Sex Power God, toothless though it was. Let's deconstruct O'Reilly's response and show not only that Bill O'Reilly loves everything Sex Power God stands for, but that he is a flaming and unrepentant liberal.
O'Reilly repeatedly assures his audience that he was not condemning students for participating in Sex Power God - what we do with our free time, he states, is our business. What O'Reilly is really concerned about, he claims, is that Brown accommodates and helps fund Sex Power God when there are (hypothetically) students - a silent majority if you will - who are offended by the party. The sensationalist presentation of his report, of course, completely undermines this assertion. Further-more, O'Reilly's un-founded assertion that students in attendance were on ecstasy undermine his claim that he's not interested in condemning students' hedonism.
If the financial policies of the University were all O'Reilly took issue with, there would have been no need to secretly send his stooge Jesse Watters to videotape the party. Sex Power God is a private affair; students are not grinding half-nude in the streets for all to behold. So why, then, did O'Reilly feel the need to present a video of the party? To punish us for our private behaviors by broadcasting them to the nation without our consent, shaming and embarrassing us.
While O'Reilly clearly does take issue with the behavior of sexually liberated young people, he also craves to join in the debauchery. In fact, he outdoes us in his perversity. Why would a balding 56-year-old man covertly tape underage girls if not for voyeuristic sexual gratification? O'Reilly could, like Playboy, have pursued official and open means of securing the opportunity to cover Sex Power God; maybe then it wouldn't have cost him 80 bucks. Instead, he chose to cash in on the thrill of voyeurism in all its unethical and titillating glory. You see, Bill O'Reilly loves Sex Power God and everything it stands for.
O'Reilly argues that the University should not accommodate or fund Sex Power God because some students could be offended by it. Conservatives often use this argument to criticize the socially liberal policies - such as making contraceptives freely available to students - of many colleges, most especially prestigious, left-leaning ones. This argumentation is flawed. Brown University is a private organization, not an extension of the government, and is not in any essential way a democratic institution. College administrators are not bound to represent the interests of tuition payers in the same way that Congress is bound to represent the interests of its taxpaying constituents. Furthermore, despite the fact that private universities are not essentially democratic institutions, there are democratic methods at Brown through which students could protest Sex Power God if they cared strongly enough to do so. No one is being oppressed here.
Thirdly, O'Reilly's argument implies that universities should strive toward a position of neutrality in appropriating funds for student activities. As godless relativist literary theorist Stanley Fish's work has sought to explain, total neutrality is an unusable concept because it provides no parameters for decision-making. Notions of "fairness" and "neutrality" are always underpinned by values - "fairness" is, in other words, never neutral. When Brown makes a decision about funding a student activity, it makes its evaluation based on ideological criteria such as whether an activity will produce constructive discussion. If Brown didn't fund student activities that some might find offensive, nothing would ever be funded.
The goal of the University should be to promote free expression in hopes that it will promote discussion, not to shy away from offending people. What O'Reilly's complaint amounts to is nothing less than whiny, liberal political-correctness that threatens to smother open discourse with its repugnant concern for the feelings of an oversensitive minority.
Bill, if you're listening, take a page from Sex Power God and come out of the closet, you depraved liberal. We all know now that you're just one of us.
Patrick Harrison '08 wants a copy of the SPG video.
