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Not requiring your pledges to do "nudity" or "sexual acts" is not "being politically correct"! Give me a break!
The point is, MOST of us (apparently not all) know hazing from not-hazing. On my campus there was one sorority that hazed their new members, and we all knew which one it was. And they had the lowest retention rate for new members of any sorority on campus. Gee, you can see how hazing really benefitted them - and in fact they have recently stopped.
I think the term "pledge" was replaced with "new member" not because there is something intrinsically wrong with the term but because the general public had such a bad image of "pledging." Paddling, forcing people to get drunk, line-ups ... no matter whether it was fair or not, it was a term to put behind us if we wanted to rehabilitate our image. Of course, the image won't go away if we haze our "new members," either. That's why more and more chapters DON'T. The general public is slow to pick up on this, and that's why we have to watch out - some of them are looking for anything, even yellow scrunchies, and if they think it's hazing, they'll use it as an excuse to trash us.
And, no, pledges aren't equal in the sense that they can't vote on many chapter issues, and they don't know the ritual, but they are our equal human beings who we have accepted as brothers or sisters. Personally, I wouldn't join an organization that didn't treat me with dignity. If I had been hazed, I would have turned around and walked out that door, and I wouldn't have wanted to walk back in.
Be warned, if your chapter is still hazing, it doesn't matter how "OK" you think it is, someday a pledge will complain or Nationals will discover it. And then you won't have any chance to haze anymore - and the other chapters on campus probably won't miss having you around and ruining the Greek reputation.
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