Last weekend, using your hard-earned money, Ohio University paid two hippies to marry the Appalachian Mountains in a chapel where proud Bobcat alumni have been wed for years. Yes, you read that correctly. You paid for UC-Santa Cruz art professor Beth Stephens and her female life partner Annie Sprinkle (the self-proclaimed world's first porn star to hold a Ph.D.) to get married to a geologic feature.
As reported by The Athens News, Stephens and Sprinkle were flown out to Athens, by the insistence of OU art professor Jennie Klein, who helped arrange Sprinkle's art show in Trisolini Gallery, which was titled Ecosexuals in Love: Our PollenAmorous Relationship with the Earth
Sky and Sea. This art installation included eco-erotic images romantic paintings sensual delights and erotic growths... all at your expense, Bobcats.
Avoiding the inevitable campus progressive's debate about whether preserved undergarments and erotic growths constitute art or not, one would think that it would behoove the university administration to reconsider such displays of decadence - such as two San Francisco Gaia-worshippers' taxpayer-funded attempts to relive their Summer of Love glory days - in the future... doubly so, when said Gaia-worshippers marry the mountains in a place so cherished by alumni as Galbreath Chapel.
Sprinkle and Stephens are free to exercise their First Amendment rights, and I applaud them on finding schmucks willing to pay them to give speeches and - pardon the pun - erect art installations full of erotic growths.
It's quite wonderful that they've found a niche market, through which they can exploit in pursuit of the American Dream. However, as an Ohio University alumnus, I'm skeptical that this sort of silliness is an economical and acceptable use of both public funds and alumni donations.
If I'm not mistaken, Ohio University has been facing a budget crisis for some time now. During this budget crisis, the university is cutting professors' salaries, cutting sports programs ... while funding and advertising same-sex marriages to geological features.
All this, of course, sidesteps the fact that Sprinkle and Stephens also claim to have been previously married to the moon, sky and sea. In other words, not only was the university funding a fake wedding in the name of feel-good environmentalist progressivism, it was funding a fake, polygamist, same-sex marriage in the name of feel-good environmentalism.
Of course, I'm being tongue-in-cheek by pointing out the fact that both same-sex and polygamist weddings are illegal in Ohio, but the fact remains that the university-sponsored Ecosexuals program was an exercise in utter and complete inanity, benefitting no one and nothing.
Art is a fine and beneficial contribution to society, but I'm extremely unconvinced that the Ecosexuals program was art. I'm stumped as to what it was, but it definitely wasn't art. And it definitely wasn't worth the time, labor and expense that the university put into it.
Jesse Hathaway graduated from Ohio University in 2010 with an English degree and is a former Post columnist.
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