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Unnecessary roughness

Once in a while, you run across an individual who thinks he or she can parent the entire world. State Representative Jean McGrath is one such person. In one of her latest wacky bills, she's proposed that no opposite-sex guests be allowed in dorm rooms. She is following in the proud tradition of women such as Francis Willard, who seek out political power to legislate their specific type of morality.

McGrath seems to have the impression the three state universities are Sodom and Gomorra. Drinking, smoking, porn, are the things she thinks we study primarily, and now she's trying to take away our sex! Never mind that legally we are adults, and never mind that that we are the consumers of our educations. Good ol' Ms. McGrath is going to save us from ourselves. McGrath is also proposing a filtering system on the Internet systems in the dorm rooms. She is trying to deal with, what she primly calls the rampant, "porn problem," in college dorm rooms. To put it mildly, she is nuts if she thinks that people are just going to stand by and let her pass these bills. They are insulting to the extreme. Perhaps she just doesn't remember college, because the people I know just do not have the time to devote to Internet porn so that it would ever qualify as a problem. The people I know actually spend the majority of their time devoted to "wholesome," activities, like their hours of homework and two or three jobs. The people whom she is trying to regulate might be a tiny minority of the university's population, but that is all they are.

What is most bothersome about McGrath's crazy bills is that they are trying to create unnecessary laws to control a group of people who have the legal right to choose whether or not they want to watch porn, entertain gentlemen callers in their rooms, buy their books at an independent bookseller off campus. Besides, who is she to dictate what people should do with their time? There are actually classes in the university that deal with the subject of human sexuality. Therefore looking at porn might even be an educational activity, and an option that Jean McGrath should have no say in.

Another element of this equation is that all of us are paying for our educations. This entitles us to have the same rights a renter would have when we pay the university thousands of dollars to rent their paltry spaces. If a person is so inclined, he or she should have the option to look at porn in a space he regards as his home when he is at school. This society, for one reason or another, has designated the age of 18 as its official mark of adulthood. And yet, many times, when we do not turn out exactly as people would like us too, society wants to wrest our responsibility from us. But we can vote, we can drive, we can be prosecuted as adults, we can die in war, and our parents are under no legal obligation to support us at that age. Therefore, we should be treated like the adults that we are legally.

Ms. McGrath may not like the youth she sees, but she has no right to legislate actions that should be up to individual discretion. If she wants people to behave respectably, then she should treat them with all the respect that adulthood entails. Whether she likes it or not, the students are what keep the university system alive. Besides, its just plain none of her business.