Rhyme versus Reason and the Monopoly of Morality

This morning, I found an article in my Yahoo Mail account that dealt with the new trend where parents of college-bound students search Face-book profiles to screen potential new room-mates for their children. I have included the article below. After the article was a comment from someone who was infuriated that people were doing these Face-book searches for the purpose of ensuring that their child would not end up with any gay roommates. This person said that if he or she had any children, he or she would do a similar search on facebook to ensure that his or her child would not end up with a "closed-minded bigot" as a roommate. I decided to post a comment myself to illustrate the irony of that person's comment. It's all below:

Parents Using Facebook To Research Kids' Roomies
Wed Aug 8, 2007 7:47PM EDT

Posted originally on Yahoo!Tech

Friends are not the only ones stopping by your Facebook profile this summer—your future college roommate and their parents are too. The worst part is they're making assumptions based on what they see on your profile to request room changes.

USA Today says more and more colleges around the country are receiving requests for room changes after parents reported not liking what they saw on Facebook. But parents aren't solely judging you on party habits alone. Housing officials say race, religion, and sexual orientation also play a part in their decision. Maureen Wark of Suffolk University in Boston told USA Today, one parent expressed "psychological and sanitary concerns" about her son's new roommates who happened to be gay men.

Unfortunately for them, not all schools are quick to make room changes. Some of them wait at least three to eight weeks, then try to mediate any problems that arise between students who don't get along. To avoid all these types of concerns, schools like the University of Georgia allows students to search their password-protected database for ideal roommates before room assignments go out.

Just one more reason to set your profile to private.

What do you think about all this?

Someone called "m_leinoff" then made this comment:

I don't have kids, but I might someday. And when they go to college, I'll want to search their new roommate's Facebook page too. I need to make sure my kid won't be living with a close-minded bigot.

I think that perhaps, m_leinoff was trying to put a clever spin on why using these kinds of facebook searches is not a good thing. Nevertheless, his or her reliance on little more than rhetoric to get his or her point pissed me off somewhat and so I replied with the following. I laid on a good amount of rhetoric myself though as you will see. It's all tongue-and-cheek:

Leinoff (Post #1):

College is all about the broadening of experience and acquiring new points of view. In line with Post #2, children need to learn to make their own decisions in order to develop into the well-rounded kind of adults that modern societies need. Otherwise, a child is at risk of becoming anchored within the limits of his or her parents' range of experience and opinion. Don’t be so closed-minded about bigotry and have faith that the child is intelligent enough to come to his or her own conclusions about what is right and what is wrong.

While society generally holds that bigotry is bad, it is equally bad for people, especially young ones, to arrive at this conclusion because of a deficiency of experience that is coupled with a life-long exposure to rhetoric that is laden with strong emotional valences. We need more reason based in independent experience and less rhyme. This is true regardless of what political or social opinions one might maintain. If we don't learn to arrive at our own conclusions independently and instead, allow ourselves to rely on the mental short-cuts that are so readily available to us, we give away the keys to our minds. If we allow this, our minds may be wrought into whatever form that is desired by the hammer that beats the drum of public opinion, including the form of a bigot. (OK, so that last sentence was heavily laden with affect but I couldn't help myself for the purpose of illustrating this irony). Perhaps bigotry, on some level, is automatically a product of the process mentioned above. If this is so, then the lines between right and left, conservative and liberal, evil and good, bigots and the enlightened, etc., become less meaningful the more we allow ourselves to live this way.