Does Being Open-Minded Mean Your Brains Fall Out?

By: American Decency Staff

By Chris Johnson "Sticks and stones may break your bones, but watching naked people on stage doing pleasurable things will never hurt you." Who would you guess said that? Hugh Hefner? Howard Stern? Charlie Sheen? How about one of your college student's professors? That was Professor John Michael Bailey of Northwestern University's response to the complaints that resulted from him featuring a demonstration where a woman stripped off her clothes on stage and her fiancée pleasured her with a sex toy in front of over 100 students. The professor's defense was that his students had "demonstrated that they are open-minded grownups rather than fragile children," which suggests that anyone who disagrees with him are the ones being childish. What is it that these "open-minded grownups" were supposed to glean from this demonstration? Here's what one student said he learned: "the demonstration itself served as a method of showing that everybody is entitled to their own sexual desires. These desires do not have to be those of anyone else and as long as they involve only consenting adults, they are acceptable." This occurrence is really just one extreme example of this professor's teaching. In his own statement regarding the demonstration, Bailey described his class. "I teach a large (nearly 600 person) human sexuality class at Northwestern University. During class I lecture about the science of sexuality. Many days after class I organize optional events. These events primarily comprise speakers addressing interesting aspects of sexuality. This year, for example, we have had a panel of gay men speaking about their sex lives, a transsexual performer, two convicted sex offenders, an expert in female sexual health and sexual pleasure, a plastic surgeon, a swinging couple, and the February 21st panel led by Ken MelvoinJBerg, on "networking for kinky people." He went on to describe his concern as he watched the demonstration. "While I watched, I experienced some apprehension. None of this apprehension had to do with the possibility of harm to any observer, and none of it had to do with a lack of educational value. As I alluded, some experiences are educational and interesting in non-traditional ways. Rather, I was worried that there could be repercussions that would threaten the valuable speaker series that I have built over the years." Welcome to higher learning. Summit Ministries hosts Seminars which are designed to prepare Christian students for the barrage of garbage that will be thrown at them when they attend college. On the Summit website, they refer to a study from U.C.L.A on Christian students who attend college. "Comparing the responses of freshmen who checked the “born againâ€Â category with the answers they gave four years later, we find that up to 59 percent no longer describe themselves as “born again.â€Â[2] That’s a 60 percent fallout rate! The numbers of students who no longer claim to be 'born again' actually vary depending on the type of school they attend. For example, students at public universities drop out of the “born againâ€Â designation at the rate of 27 percent. Protestant colleges show 31 percent fewer “born againsâ€Â by their senior year! Those attending private (secular) universities indicate a 45 percent decline. And interestingly, Catholic colleges have the highest percentage, where 59 percent no longer call themselves 'born again.'" Is there any wonder when men like Michael Bailey are what pass as psychology professors? When students are being indoctrinated to feel they are "fragile children' if they don't approve of a woman masturbating in front of 100 people? Leftist philosopher and professor Robert Rorty said this about Christian students and their secular professors: " It seems to me that the regulative idea that we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists, most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of ‘needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions’ … It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own … The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students … When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank… You have to be educated in order to be … a participant in our conversation … So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours … I don’t see anything herrschaftsfrei [domination free] about my handling of my fundamentalist students. Rather, I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents … I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause." God warns us in I Corinthians 3:18,19 about the teachings of the world. "Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you seems to be wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, 'He catches the wise in their own craftiness.'". It's time for Christians to accept that "higher education" is no longer just about finding a good job. It is an equal goal of many professors to pull out the roots of students from Christian families so that they too will be "dead in sin."

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