What are you fighting for?

Richard A. Sokerka

“What are you fighting for?” is the catch phrase used by the University of Notre Dame in its public service announcements that air on NBC-TV during home games of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team. Each one highlights the efforts of the Notre Dame community in making the world a better place.

And that catch phrase, “What are you fighting for?” most certainly portrays the efforts by students at the University of Notre Dame to block pornography sites on the university’s Wi-Fi networks.

More than one hundred students have signed letters, one sent by men and one by women, requesting that filters be installed on university networks. The letters also referenced an online petition, at which more than 1,000 “students, faculty, staff, and friends of Notre Dame” requested the same filter.

The men’s letter, published Oct. 23 in the university’s student newspaper, said that a filter “would send the unequivocal message that pornography is an affront to human rights and catastrophic to individuals and relationships.” The women’s letter, published Oct. 24 in the same newspaper, was addressed to the signatories of the men’s letter. “We stand in solidarity with your request to filter out pornography on Notre Dame’s wireless internet networks,” it said.

“Every human person is worthy of the utmost dignity and respect. Pornography use at Notre Dame threatens this respect by preventing men and women from encountering the full personhood of one another in friendships and relationships. How? Pornography propagates a mindset that people, especially women, are mere sex objects,” the Oct. 24 letter said.

That letter noted that pornography “is associated with a host of issues: addiction, child sexual abuse, divorce, male fertility problems, sexual assault and the acceptance, normalization and sexualization of cruelty towards women. It contributes to prostitution, human trafficking and the proliferation of sexually transmitted diseases,” the letter stated.

The Oct. 24 letter sent by female students acknowledged that the university forbids that pornography be viewed on its wireless networks. But they noted, “a written rule alone does nothing to stop its rampant consumption, and this rule is rarely, if ever, enforced. It is time for the university to take a serious stand against pornography and implement a filter on Notre Dame’s Wi-Fi” the letter said.

It’s most encouraging to see the students at one of the nation’s pre-eminent Catholic universities taking action to ask the administration to ban these pornographic websites.

We applaud the efforts of students in this cause and nominate them for a future appearance in Notre Dame’s public service ads for fighting the scourge of pornography at Our Lady’s University.