From down the ages comes a common children’s game called “You-show-me-yours-I’ll-show-you-mine.” Surely, sweet reader, you never played it. But just as surely you have heard of it. After all, it does still exist. It comes now with upgrades.
What was once a forbidden pastime among prepubescent kids has been reimagined for young adults by cultivated minds at Georgetown University. Persons old enough to marry, vote, and go to war can amuse themselves with the old game, this time with grown-up approval. The revamped version includes one highly significant improvement: If I like yours better, I can have it. Or, at least, pretend to while I get used to the idea.
It is a timely, empirical diversion designed to keep customers coming. Georgetown already earns four out of five stars on the Campus Pride Index. Here is a chance for the full monty.
Campus Reform informs us that the once-eminent Jesuit university has approved a residential housing option reserved exclusively for students interested in exploring gender-and-sexuality conundrums beyond the confines of a seminar room. “Associate Director of Residential Education Katie Heather informs student Grace Smith, leader of the LLC [Living Learning Community] effort, that her proposal [for a queer-only campus residence’ has ‘been approved and accepted for the 2018-2019 academic year. Congratulations!'”
Heather’s email to Smith, who heads the student government’s LGBTQ+ Inclusivity Policy Team, adds that logistics are being finalized: “This includes the location of the community, marketing, and the application process.”
Note the emphasis on marketing. Georgetown will promote the LLC dorm as a selling point. With an annual price tag of about $72, 214 (base tuition of $52,300 plus room, board, and standard add-ons), the university’s expanded excursion into non-judgmental, fictive experience will—it is hoped—broaden consumer appeal and be good for box office.
Dude, I Think You Need to Read a Catholic Catechism
Vice President of Student Affairs Todd Olson croons that this new residence—a leading-edge safe space—upholds “Jesuit values of community in diversity and educating the whole person.” He continues: “It is in keeping with our Catholic and Jesuit values to provide a language, perspective, and sense of inclusion for deepening our sense of cura personalis.”
Georgetown already permits students to live—and shower and pee—with those who identify themselves however they choose, regardless of their biological sex. Which Catholic and Jesuit values accord with facilitating student petitions to inhabit in real-time the dystopian eroticism encouraged in “Brave New World”? And what, precisely, are the duties of a director of residential education?
The office suggests that education as a function of the classroom is an idea that no longer holds. Cocooned behind her title, Georgetown’s Heather sounds as cheerfully forward-thinking as Aldous Huxley’s director of Hatcheries and Conditioning. The DHC, on a tour of the garden, observes a small group of kidlets at play:
‘That’s a charming little group,’ he said pointing.
. . . two children, a little boy of about seven and a little girl who might have been a year older, were playing very gravely and with all the focused attention of scientists intent on a labour of discovery, a rudimentary sexual game.
‘Charming, charming,’ the DHC repeated sentimentally.
The director is interrupted by the sound of crying:
From a neighboring shrubbery emerged a nurse, leading by the hand a small boy who howled as he went. An anxious-looking little girl trotted at her heels.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked the Director.
The nurse shrugged her shoulders. ‘Nothing much,’ she answered. ‘It’s just that this little boy seems rather reluctant to join in the ordinary erotic play. I’d noticed it once or twice before. And now again today. He started yelling just now . . .’
We’re Happy to Have You in Lifelong Therapy
In a sane culture, any applicant for Georgetown’s pandering experiment in educational living would be directed to therapy for counseling. But that is all past us now. Therapists are in on the scheme.
Mystification of sexuality, with its kaleidoscope of fanciful genders, opens a valuable new stream of lifelong clients seeking affirmation. Pathology attaches now only to those who cling to an outmoded understanding of normalcy and, like Huxley’s tyke, resist the game: “[Nurse says], ‘I’m taking him in to see the Assistant Superintendent of Psychology. Just to see if anything’s at all abnormal.’”
You might think that care for the entire person—cura personalis—would demand countering the long, institutional march against established norms, particularly sexual ones. That charity in its fullness would deny efforts to override the concept of normalcy and of nature itself. Instead, a Jesuit institution has permitted LBGTQ militants to turn a gracious phrase into a slogan of infiltration with a religious gloss.
Note the hashtag Smith appends to her exultant email crowing about the group’s ideological inversion of the Latin phrase: #queerpersonalis. It is almost tempting to view Georgetown’s docility from the perspective of George Orwell’s remark: “There’s always room for one more custard pie.” Only this pie is toxic.
