Kellenberg taking heat for cancelling prom

Kellenberg just says no to senior prom culture : Newsday (October 10, 2005)

Why do many parents on Long Island sacrifice to send their children to parochial schools? The decision to cancel this year's senior prom at Kellenberg Memorial High School in Uniondale might provide a clue.

Among various reasons to choose parochial schools, an obvious factor is that these institutions offer something special - an education rooted in faith and traditional moral values.

In an important sense, such an education should be countercultural. It should reject both ever-expanding secularism pushing God to the sidelines and acceptance of an anything-goes-that-feels-good moral relativism. So perhaps it shouldn't have been surprising last month when Kellenberg, a Roman Catholic school, announced it would no longer sponsor a senior prom.

Brother Kenneth Hoagland, the principal at Kellenberg, told me: "We certainly would want to instill [in the students] a proper sense of values, and we felt that the prom culture was going in the opposite direction." He noted that this was not particular to Kellenberg, nor should it be viewed as punishing students.

At the risk of sounding like a prude, I think that certain "traditions" or "parties" have been given a Jekyll-Hyde transformation.

Around the time I turned 21 in the 1970's there was a high-water mark in the sexual revolution. The place that everyone was talking about was Plato's Retreat. Clubs like this were shut down not only for the drugs and prostiution but out of health concerns with the spread of AIDS.

Proms became the gateway drug to sexual anarchy.

It's a sad cultural indicator that's the outrage lasted only a day or two on
the story of the Minnesota Vikings sex cruise, which included allegations of drugs, prostitution, and threats and solicitations made to women employees of these ships.

Shocked by the Vikings boat bash? Hardly : Pioneer Press

"We're not immune but desensitized to acts like this," said Doug Hartmann, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota who studies American culture.

Another social critic on the Vikings from OnMilwaukee