Opinion
Kansan
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
Published daily since 1912
Ann Premer, Editor Jamie Holman, Business manager Gerry Doyle, Managing editor Sara Cropper, Retail sales manager Angie Kuhn, Managing editor Dan Simon, Sales and marketing adviser Tom Eblen, General manager, news adviser Justin Knupp, Technology coordinator
Friday, March 12, 1999
W. David Keith / KANSAN
Editorials
Student's $75,000 lawsuit arrives too late to discipline fraternity
Matthew Prime, St. Louis junior, has filed a $75,000 lawsuit against the Kansas chapter of Pi Kappa Alpha, the National Pi Kappa Alpha Fraternity, the University of Kansas, the Kansas Board of Regents, Mount Oread Housing Corporation and six individuals who were on the 1997 Pi Kappa Alpha executive board.
The suit comes two years after a Feb. 27 incident in which Prime experienced a 12-hour coma caused by alcohol poisoning. Prime holds the named parties responsible for his ordeal.
Although the damages may be extensive, Prime and his attorney, Theodore Lickteig, should have filed suit long ago. Now, after two years of rebuilding, rehabilitation and reforming Pi Kappa Alpha, the fraternity must face another penalty.
Pi Kappa Alpha already has received punishment for a 1997 hazing incident.
Pi Kappa Alpha already has paid the price.
Bill Nelson, coordinator for Greek Programs, said that when the University found the chapter guilty of hazing, a strict suspension was enforced. Nelson said most of the privileges fraternities and sororites were granted were revoked from the chapter and additional responsibilities were implemented. He said also that about 50 members were removed from the chapter and that the remaining members have been meeting with suspension liaisons. Nelson and Danny Kaiser, director of the Organizations and Leadership Development Center, who have been helping to rehabilitate the chapter.
And the Kansas chapter of Pl Kappa Alpha has indeed reformed. Only two of the chapters current members were affiliated at the time of the incident. Prime should not have waited two years to file the lawsuit because now he is affecting a new group of innocent people. The chapter's two-year minimum suspension will be reviewed and possibly removed on April1.
Lickteig said the suit took two years to be filed because of the time it took to evaluate the case and to put the information together.
Nevertheless, the incident occurred long ago, and the chapter has faced penalties. Both parties should be able to move on. Instead, Prime is dredging up the past and demanding money. Prime should not be suing the defendants two years after the fact; it only prolongs the anxiety of both parties.
Emily Hughey for the editorial board
Group blowing whistle on violence
Today is the last day that members of Working Against Violence Everywhere will pass out safety whistles in an effort to increase campus safety. Students concerned for their safety on campus should take the time to pick up a whistle.
According to Jane Stoever, WAVE vice-president, whistles are a safe way for women to protect themselves.
"Unlike mace or a knife, a whistle really can't be used against you, it is a preventive measure," Stoever said. "If someone is approaching you, you can blow the whistle and deter them."
A safety whistle allows someone who believes he or she is in trouble to call for help more effectively than other
Working Against Violence Everywhere whistles still are available on campus today.
methods, such as yelling. The whistle is a distinctive noise that should signal to others that someone is in trouble.
WAVE will distribute 9,000 whistles this week on campus. The whistles were bought thanks to a $3,000 grant that the group received from Coca-Cola.
becomes useless. This is similar to cases in which people ignore car alarms because of so many false alarms.
It is important that students do not use these whistles as toys. If students blow whistles when they are not in danger, then blowing a whistle for help
WAVE members have received encouragement from many who already have received safety whistles. Students who have received whistles expressed gratitude that someone was working for campus safety. According to WAVE, a number of students have expressed concern about safety on campus.
WAVE also is working on other campus safety issues including better campus lighting and developing a campus walk program.
Students who wish to pick up a free safety whistle can do so today in front of Wescoe Hall.
Timothy Burger for the editorial board
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Ryan Koerner . . . . . . Editorial
Jeremy Doherty . . . Associate editorial
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*Broaden your mind: Today's quote*
"The sort of thing you say is the thing that will be told to you." —Homer
Broaden your mind: Today's quote
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Perspective
Recently, I was listening to Pat Buchanan ranting about the evils of popular music. On the other side of the political fence, Al and Tipper Gore sound a similar battle cry.
Parents' clout eclipses influence of pop music
They both conclude that strong families are the only things that can save us from our musical demons. Although I think they're way off base about the influence of popular music, I agree with them wholeheartedly about the importance of family.
Various people have waged a war against controversial music for some time. I remember when I was 5 years old and had just
Robert K. Funk
opinion@kansan.com
It was — and still is — very hokey, but at 5 years old, I thought it was all pretty neat. Needless to say, my parents were less than thrilled. When I listened to my Kiss albums in the house, I had to use headphones — my folks didn't want that kind of music playing from the speakers.
While growing up, I was bombarded with propaganda about Kiss. I attended church group meetings on a regular basis back then, and the group leaders often would play tapes that supposedly had been made by playing Kiss albums backward. These tapes were supposed to expose Satanic messages that Kiss had "backmasked" into the albums.
I probably heard those tapes a dozen times, and I never heard anything other than garbled sound, similar to what one would expect to hear when playing albums backward.
The church groups always handed out long lists of evil musicians that people should avoid listening to at all costs. One of the musicians who always made those lists was a bat-eating alcoholic named Ozzy Osbourne.
I remember when a young man killed himself after listening to one of Ozzy's songs, "Suicide Solution." The boy's family blamed Ozzy for the death of their son.
The family took the position that Ozzy's music was the sole reason the son was dead, and the pseudo-religious right was quick to rally behind them.
Did these people really believe that an otherwise mentally healthy young man would take his own life at the behest of Ozzy Osbourne?
Did they really want to give a drunken rocker that much power?
I think it's clear that the young man had other problems, serious problems, and he apparently didn't have a support structure there when he needed it. That young man could have been listening to REM's "Shiny Happy People," and he still would have killed himself.
I also remember when "gangster rap" emerged in the late 1980s. I'm from a small town in rural western Kansas, but gangster rap still was popular among the high school kids. We listened to it while lifting weights and before sports practices.
It seems that our parents did their jobs. They raised us in an imperfect world, knowing that we would be exposed to horrible evils such as Kiss, Ozzy and gangster rap. They taught us how to deal with such things, knowing that we would soon be on our own and have to deal with them ourselves. In other words, they upheld their end of the social contract.
According to the proponents of censorship, we should have been treating women as objects and committing various acts of violence, but for some reason, we weren't.
I occasionally still listen to music that is considered controversial. I even attended the recent Marilyn Manson show at the Granada, 1020 Massachusetts St. To the surprise of Manson's detractors, I haven't gone out and molested any children or committed any acts of bestiality. The truth is, I'm getting older, and my musical tastes now run to Chopin, Vivaldi and Rachmaninoff.
I think listening to controversial music is a phase, a part of growing up. I listened to Kiss. Kids before me listened to the Rolling Stones, and kids before that listened to the Beatles. Kids after me listened to Motley Crue, and now the kids are listening to Marilyn Manson. When Manson is no longer shocking, someone else will be.
If parents do their jobs, no music can lead their kids astray. If they don't do their jobs, we're in trouble no matter what music happens to be playing in the background. Parents should leave the musicians alone and concentrate instead on teaching their kids how to live in an imperfect world.
Funk is a Scott City graduate student in law and business.
Blood donor rule works to save recipients' lives
It is appalling that homosexuals have been denied employment and housing solely on the basis of their sexual orientation. It is disturbing that they cannot legally marry
whom they love. But it is both reasonable and good public policy that men who have had sex with other men not be allowed to donate blood.
The Food and Drug Administration policy barring men who have had sex with other men since 1977 from giving blood is not about homophobia. It's about preventing the transmission of a fatal disease.
Rachel Robson
Guest columnist
Of course, having had male-to-male intercourse
doesn't necessarily mean that one carries a disease. Neither does having a piercing in the past year, having a family member with Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease or having visited Africa. But all of these things increase the risk of disease transmission.
Although it has been observed that new HIV infections are not occurring among gay men as quickly as they are in straight women, the percentage of gay men infected — 49 percent of all American HIV cases, according to the Center for Disease Control—still is much greater than the percentage infected in any other demographic group.
And no one can accuse blood banks of homophobia toward lesbians. With the lowest-risk sexual behavior save cabibacy, lesbians are welcomed to blood banks with open arms.
To insure that diseases aren't passed from blood donor to recipient, blood centers ask a series of questions to all potential donors to determine whether the donors are at a high risk for any of a number of blood-borne diseases — not just HIV.
The centers ask if the donor has been to Africa or if the donor has been incarcerated. They ask about growth hormones and body piercing. And yes, they ask about one's sexuality.
Some call this an invasion of privacy and argue that it "smacks of homophobia," as Raven Heavy Runner was quoted in the March 2 University Daily Kansan. It's not. It's a defense of public health.
why can't blood centers just test the blood and leave the personal questions out of it? Testing for blood is not that simple. Tests can't always detect a disease-causing pathogen—even if it's there.
The HIV test detects antibodies to the virus
In "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome," a textbook on HIV and AIDS, author Gerald Stine points out that such screening criteria has reduced the potential blood donor pool by 10 to 15 percent. When only 20 percent of the population is eligible to donate blood, and only 4 percent does so, according to the American Association of Blood Banks, a 10 to 15 percent reduction is pretty significant.
When the question of sexuality first was mandated by the FDA, blood centers balked: "...Gays represented one of the most loyal donor groups," Starr wrote. "No one wanted to lose the best donors or contribute in any way to anti-yay prejudice."
The personal questions asked by blood centers save lives, which is why they are asked. Blood bankers, who are trying to get as much safe blood as possible, obviously would prefer not to have to ask such questions.
It is understandable that gay men, who have faced such malicious discrimination in other areas, might see homophobic intent in the FDA regulations. But such intent is not there. The only intent behind the regulations is to provide safe blood to the patients who need it.
Giving blood is a selfless act. But charging that all have an equal right to donate when medical science and bitter history show the tragic consequences of this belief is selfish in the extreme.
not the virus itself. It takes a human body time to develop antibodies after it has been infected. Sometimes that time is in months. Sometimes it is years.
In any case, during that time, an infected donor would come up clean and pass the disease on to a blood transfusion recipient. When questions aren't asked, blood recipients die.
Treating people equally is important, but saving lives is more important. Lives are saved by screening blood donors with otherwise private questions.
Well-meaning officials in France learned this lesson in 1992 when a group of hemophiliacs sued them for collecting and transfusing tainted blood. The blood had been collected from prisoners — a known high-risk group — because it was thought that the altruistic act of donating would help rehabilitate them, Douglas Starr writes in "Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce."
Our formerly egalitarian attitude toward blood donors also has cost lives. The first was a baby, given blood from a healthy-looking man in 1982. Starr wrote. If the right questions had been asked, the baby — and the many who followed her — could have been saved.
Robson is a Baldwin City senior in biology.
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