“Kinky” column borrows from Minnesota Daily, but misses the mark

Earlier this week, Star Tribune columnist Katherine Kersten went after a student group at the University of Minnesota, “Kinky U,” after reading in The Minnesota Daily, the university’s student-run newspaper, about the group’s quest to become an official student organization.

She should be less judgmental. The information disseminated by Kinky U can save lives, even those of her peers.

At any rate, Kersten not only read the article in the Minnesota Daily, but copied a lot of it down. A former editorial staffer from The Minnesota Daily found Kersten’s column bordering on plagiarism.

While you do cite your source and note that no one was available to comment, I find your actions to instead steal another reporter’s work and print it under the guise of your work to be the borderline of plagiarism. You are not writing a blog for the Internet, Ms. Kersten, you are getting paid as a writer.

Not quite plagiarism, but the two articles are essentially the same text, but one has been value-added with Kersten’s snark and judgment. Kersten makes subtle admonishments regarding kinky sex and insinuates that it is wrong and should be discouraged.

At the U, as in much of academe, the language of “health and safety” has hijacked our old vocabulary of right and wrong.

Kinky U’s meetings focus “on keeping all parties comfortable and safe in their endeavors,” according to The Daily. “Some extreme practices can be potentially dangerous, so the group aims to educate those interested about the risks involved.”

Why not just discourage extreme practices? We wouldn’t want to be judgmental, would we?

Some may be surprised to learn that this is the sort of knowledge the university is helping to disseminate, especially because it is apparently always short of resources. But they shouldn’t be surprised.

The column certainly whipped up a frenzy among the target audience. The Minnesota Family Council weighed in:

“The moral bankruptcy of the University is articulated by comments from the University’s vice provost for student affairs Jerry Rinehart,” wrote Family Council head Tom Prichard. Rinehart told The Daily that university policy allows students the freedom to assemble, and that it is up to students, elected by their peers, to determine where funds collected from students should be distributed. Prichard continues:

Once the Judeo-Christian perspective of sexuality and proper sexual perspective is jettisoned, e.g., sex between a man and a woman inside a marriage relationship, there’s no stopping point. … The consequence? Social anarchy. Sure, the actual practitioners of “Kinky U” sex are few in number but they’re merely the vanguard of the sexual revolution with lots of heterosexual promiscuity following in their wake.

And without skipping a beat, the Family Council determines that the existence of Kinky U will result in the legalization of “marriage for homosexuals.”

But members of the conservative, Judeo-Christian community have died because of a lack of information, the very type of information that Kersten and the Family Council decry.

Remember Jerry Falwell? Well, he didn’t die from kinky activities, but a close associate of his did. Minnesota blogger Spotty, one of Kersten’s staunchest critics, reminds us that the Rev. Gary Aldridge, a graduate of and former dean at Liberty University and a former employee of Falwell’s, died under less-than-vanilla circumstances.

The autopsy, prepared by Dr. Stephen Boudreau of the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences, lists “accidental mechanical asphyxia” as the cause of death. Aldridge’s hands and feet were bound together behind his back, and they were attached to a nylon cord fastened around his neck.

The body was dressed in a face mask with a single breathing vent, two wetsuits and was bound with cords and a belt, according to the report.

Aldridge suffocated to death.

A group like Kinky U at Liberty University might have saved Aldridge’s life. Lord knows he had enough judgment and biblical sexuality teachings as a result of working for the very evangelical Jerry Falwell and from the very Christian curriculum he oversaw at Liberty University. It wasn’t his lack of Judeo-Christian understandings on sexuality that killed him, and it wasn’t a lack of information on how “right or wrong” certain practices are. He knew what those around him thought about that.

What killed him was a lack of understanding about the safety of the activities he enjoyed engaging in, a lack of information on kinky sex. That’s all the students at the university are trying to do: make not-so-vanilla sex safer and “educate those interested about the risks involved.”