Abstaining doesn’t have to mean being alone

When I was shopping around for colleges, I was indifferent to the number of student… When I was shopping around for colleges, I was indifferent to the number of student organizations present on campuses trying to tickle my fancy. Few things stood out in my mind. I wanted there to be a religious community, some sign of intelligent life outside the classroom and a decent opportunity for the occasional house party. That’s all I needed. I’m a simple girl.

I was rather put off by the ramblings of campus tour guides. The informed student tour guide at Georgetown sticks out in my mind for being proud of the fact that the school prohibited Greek life in an effort to instill more campus pride, rather than allowing for such a degree of loyalty to one organization. It sounded like a school with big rocks and low self-esteem to me. I passed.

The Pathfinder that led me around Pitt’s campus wasn’t much better. He improved when my mother asked about campus groups. He remarked that there were more than 300. He later confessed that he wasn’t personally involved in any of them except the Pathfinders. Perfect!

So here I am at Pitt. It seems to have been a match made in Oakland, except that now I wish I had the opportunity to redo the past almost-four years at Princeton just because of, say it ain’t so, a new student organization on that campus.

The Anscombe Society can gladly claim me as an interested member at large.

The group is named after Elizabeth Anscombe, the writer of a 1977 essay, “Contraception and Chastity,” famous among conservative Roman Catholics for setting out a philosophical defense of the papacy’s strictures on sexual behavior. Anscombe died in 2001.

So, I’m not a Catholic, but neither is the Anscombe Sociey, although several of its members are both Catholic and politically conservative. While that may shape the direction in which the group goes, it’s not the point. The group’s primary focus is merely to support abstinence.

According to Anscombe spokesperson David Schaengold, a self-described card-carrying Democrat, “We are trying to remove this discussion from a setting that would make people uncomfortable — from a religious setting, for example — and make it available to everyone.”

Sounds fine to me. I’d love to talk about abstinence with some people without having to quote Scripture or recite any religions teachings. It seems as if Princeton is on to something here for real, though. There are groups that promote safe sex. OK, parents, administrators and whoever else wants to deny it: There are college students having sex and openly discussing it. But there aren’t many groups that talk about abstinence without a religious agenda hiding up their pants.

I wholeheartedly believe in the ability to have stimulating conversation about a topic and feel safe that, among your intelligent peers, ideas can be shared, argued, refuted, upheld and encouraged. There are still those among us strolling through campus who stop to read the plainly formatted flyers with words like “roundtable,” “panel,” “forum” and “discussion” on them.

If I were practicing abstinence, I know I’d need some space to talk about what I deal with at least every week. And some Christian group encouraging me to “pray about it” and suppress my feelings just wouldn’t be enough.

I applaud the Anscombe Society members. No one said organizing for what you believe in would ever be popular. Daring to be different is never easy, but it does enable several nights of self-assured sleep — alone.

Abstain from sleeping alone with Maria Nicole Smith at marianicoles@aol.com, where hate mail is never accepted.