To the Editor:
When I first came to Dartmouth, my sister, a '93, said that everyone reads The Dartmouth Review for a good laugh. "They glance at it Friday before they go out." Fine, that's all good. I can understand if in the past it was tolerated as being simply the freakish ideas of those who fail to deal with the evolution of society.
However, when I walked into my house yesterday, I saw the normal stack of reviews sitting on our stairs, waiting to be put to use: kindling, lining trash cans, etc. But the headline, "National Coming Out Week ... Diversity or Perversity," was too much for me to resist. So I asked myself, what have they done this time?
To my utter dismay, I realized that the writers and editors had completely stepped off the deep end. As if the derogatory front page wasn't bad enough (four pieces of fruit dressed to look like Mr. Potato Head), the lead editorial "Lock the Closet," makes the "accident" that occurred with Mein Kampf look like child's play. In it, Editor in Chief E. Davis Brewer, Jr., '95 makes casual links between homosexuality and drug abusers "with AIDS" as if the two are intimately associated.
I'm not quite sure how they could print such loaded words as "fag" and claim any kind of moral superiority. Aside from the fact that the entire premise of the issue was incredibly offensive to any self-respecting human, homosexual or heterosexual, it was a direct affront to the basic foundations of Dartmouth that the paper claims so dear.
No longer does anyone have to speak of vague attacks on certain groups. These writers have illustrated to the rest of the campus that they indeed are social pariahs and should be ostracized. I do not want Dartmouth tainted with such blatant anti-intellectualism. That is not to say that the administration should take action. Similarly, students should not go around picking up the Review so that others cannot read it. The responsibility lies with the students of this campus to do what is right. "They got a right to say it wrong if freedom's to survive." But we certainly don't have to stand idly by while they exercise this right.
