Letter to the Editor

The Daily is the local school newspaper at the University Of Washington, where I go to school.
About a week ago, I was upset at this really bad article on why sex should be within marriage only they published. It is notoriously difficult to get conservative writers to write for the paper, so I can understand that they have to go with what they get, but this was a particularly bad article. I wrote this letter to the editor in response:

Last week's article "Marriage is the right way for sex" by Brandon Dennis was so bad it was almost self parodying. There are good conservative writers with intelligent things to say and well thought out arguments, but Mr. Dennis is not one of them. I have to wonder whether Dennis has spent much time thinking about his positions or if he just writes about them.

Dennis makes the strange claim that people are "built with an innate desire for marriage." Without religious reasoning, this is a pretty weird notion. People have a genetic desire to participate in one particular social institution? Give me a break. He makes a half-hearted attempt to support his claim, but ends up just restating his
opinion.

At one particularly silly point in the article, Dennis cites the Declaration of Independence, and seems to suggest that perhaps people don't have the right to engage in casual sex because it is not the pursuit of happiness since it doesn't make people happy.

Even the strongest argument made in the article, which is that it is possible to get hurt by having sex outside of marriage, is pretty lame. It's possible to get hurt in any type of romantic relationship, including marriage; about one half of American marriages end in divorce. He seems to argue that if it's possible to get hurt by doing something then you shouldn't do it at all, which is ridiculous.

His article doesn't make any credible arguments against sex outside of marriage so I don't know why Dennis thinks it is bad idea, and I suspect he doesn't know either.

I am not a conservative by any measure, and I realize that it is difficult to find local credible conservative voices, but I think the Daily does a disservice to its readers when the only conservative viewpoint presented is so difficult to take seriously.

I would have liked to respond some more, but it's supposed to be under 250 words and it's already 300+