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In this day and age I tend to have faith in people. I believe that if someone was to go through rush who felt so strongly against gays as to not pledge a fraternity who had a gay man in it, it would be the loss of the rushee.
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Sailorchic, you bring up a very real point here.
Many chapters fear that if they extend a bid to a homosexual gentleman then they will lose a lot of other rushees.
When we do Rush, we are marketing ourselves to guys a year (or less) out of high school. Typically they are not as "enlightened" as we claim to be
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On one level you would say this should not effect the bid extending process in any way (at least for this specific reason).. But it most certainly does in many chapters.
Does this in fact occur? Not in my experience. It has really had little if any effect on one of the houses on my campus that experienced this. They are still #1 for amount of members and have continued to have large pledge classes.
It however is still a huge fear. Think back to high school and you and your peers' views on homosexuality, those are the folks we're trying to recruit -- so you might imagine this is a real fear.
The fraternity is first and foremost a brotherhood based on shared core of beliefs. However, it is also a business and we have to keep our membership at a certain level in order to meet our expenses.
I think that what others have said saying that eventually this will become a more and more accepted part of our culture is true. However, with change there are always growing pains, always people that resist it.
For the prospective rushee, if it is presented in the right light I think it is a huge positive rather than a negative. It shows to them that we consider brothers to be brothers, no matter what. We may have our differences but that does not override the fraternal intent of our fraternity.
Probably 20 years from now this will not be as much of a factor, but right now it is. This is a very interesting discussion.
LHT
Kevin