A brief peek into one secularist's alma mater, an ass-kicking that never happened and the moral hazards of sexual obsession.
A more eloquent statement of the following background information can be found in the links from this search of the Daily Princetonian.
Francisco Nava, a junior at Princeton, was a leader in the pro-abstinence Anscombe Society at that university. His organization made waves and garnered critics. Reports of death threats against Nava, conservative professor Robert George and other conservative activists on campus from, presumably, pro-sex liberal militants or harassers formed the basis of controversy on campus, with criticisms of the University's perceived soft response against compared to recent prior threats made against LGBT students. Nava became more or less a public figure at the University in this process.
Nava then reported being assaulted by two black-clad males two miles off campus, resulting in apparent injuries. As it turns out, the injuries were real but were self-inflicted; like the Jim Carrey character in Liar Liar, Nava kicked his own ass (and, having been caught, his career's and reputation's asses as well.) Nava admitted doing this to promote the Anscombe Society and sexual abstience as a sort of no-nookie agitprop by false pretense. Turns out Nava had faked prior threats during his impoverished, underprivileged years at the Groton School as well; that fact contributed to skepticism and eventual outing of this fraud against the good name of a lot of people and against the public fisc of Princeton Township, NJ.
I bring this up because it illustrates so clearly the mentality against which many of us secularists are fighting. Religiously-based or non-religiously based sexual abstinence are 100% valid choices. So is the choice to refrain from staying up too late, eating pork rinds or anything else. There is nothing per se wrong with a group of sexual abstinents or pork rind abstinents from assembling for mutual support, sociability, etc.
But one must ask what morality considers a public fraud as more moral than the choice to have consensual sexual relations?
I am hardly the one to lead the pro-sex charge. In my own life, both as an undergraduate at Princeton and since, my personal life is probably on the 10% least "out there", the conservative end of the bell curve. At one time, I was religious, attended daily Mass most days, lived a sexually conservative life even by the non-freewheeling standards of late 1980s' Prionceton for straight men, with a 3-2 men to women ratio for us straight fellows (and from what I heard, it was even worse for LGBT students in Princeton's often repressively conservative environment.) Conservatives, of course, were excellent at playing the victim; one imagined that many of them identified with Jesus on the cross as they suffered through the fact that women were then demanding the gender integration of the eating clubs, that liberals did not hide in fear. More than one time, I suspected that conservative "victimization" reports on campus, including those of erstwhile friends, were fakes, buncombe. But I digress. I am an unlikely standard bearer for "pro-sex" advocacy; my habits were more hard-core geek, as in "bury me with my 20-sided dice on."
What's worse: perpetrating a fraud on law enforcement and slandering one's neighbors implicitly, or engaging in adult consensual sexual activities? Apparently the latter is worse. In Maryland - don't know about New Jersey - it's a crime to make a false statement to a cop with intent that a report be taken or a filing made. Nava may actually face criminal charges if New Jersey's laws are similar in pertinent part.
But it's the especially sex-phobic Christian religion that makes this sort of thing possible. Mind you, not having sex is often an excellent idea, sometimes the only responsible choice. But there was no "anti-fraud" or "anti-slander" similar organization. Fraud and slander do real damage and did real damage here, whereas adult consensual sex harms presumably no one. But sex is a bugaboo for much of the Christian religion and tradition. In Catholic tradition, St. Augustine held that it was the evil character of the act of sexual coitus that transmitted original sin to the fetus. While Augustine's view is no longer technically the Church's view, Augustine is still honored as a saint and "doctor" of the Church. Even in the less sex-negative Christian cultures, it is sex, rather than sexual irresponsibility or sexual violence or sexual fraud or sexual dehumanization of people, that gets condemned.
Thus we find a presumably tortured soul whose hatred of sexual expression is greater than his love of truth and his own integrity. Nava is ruined; Princeton will probably expel him and he will have to explain for the rest of his life to employers why he got kicked out of Princeton. "The Google" will bust him if he tries to lie again. Flush an Ivy League education, or the majority of one, down the toilet, goodbye. All because stopping nookie was worth a public fraud and slander.
It makes one wonder: where would we be if Augustine had decidedly that it was the tendency to lie or to predate on others or to organize mass hatred, rather than sexual desire, wherein our "original sin" (or yetzer hara or other "evil" inclination) lay. Would we be as scared of fraud and lies as we seem to be about sex, even today? Would we have better due process and fewer Larry Craigs? One wonders.