According to recent headlines, the Loyola community is in turmoil.
A public discussion board regarding the Loyola community’s perception of gender roles ultimately resulted in disturbing, pervasive sexism from both corners of the field. There are also reports that Loyola has fewer cliques, suggesting a campus-wide breaking down of previous societal norms. There are students walking barefoot throughout campus.
Now, school-wide attention is on the lack of Loyola-supplied contraceptive options for tuition-paying students that help make Loyola what it is. Many students agree that this needs to be changed.
To enact such a change, we will need a revolution; and what better way to revolt against a Catholic school’s Catholic principles than with the same strategy employed by those who are revolting against a capitalist government’s capitalist principles? That’s right: we need to come together as a unified, ill-informed mass and occupy the St. Ignatius Chapel.
One obvious problem with our movement, fellow Occupants, is that we unfortunately knew upon arrival that Loyola University is a Jesuit institution. Since we cannot approach the problem from an “I didn’t know” perspective, we instead have to figure out how to vaguely define the problem.
The big one that I can think of is how the availability of condoms affects us students more markedly than it does any 50-year-old clergy member, and there are way more of us than them to boot. We can just use our inspiration’s precedence, and simply point out that we are indeed the 99 percent and that the remaining one percent is infringing upon our human rights. In a democratic society, it would seem inarguable that some great wrong is taking place on Loyola’s campus.
But is it? The Loyola administration no doubt understands the importance of the students that attend Loyola, and the absence of campus-distributed condoms does not necessarily mean that it is impossible to be on campus and have condoms at the same time.
In fact, condoms are present throughout all of New Orleans, and at least as pervasively as sexism was in the aforementioned discussion board.
So, despite the fact that it goes against the incoherent teachings of the Occupy Movement, perhaps the best idea is not to demand that the
institution we willingly attend bring such necessities to us; rather, we should all hold ourselves individually responsible for our own needs, and on our own time. Besides, C-Store condoms would probably cost so much that the act of buying them regularly would technically denote you as a person with enough income to comfortably support a child anyway, so it’s a moot point.
Richard Carlile can be reached at
