Quote:
Originally posted by ktsnake
I'm with Tom on this one. Sure you could pledge someone that took an oath and then just changed his mind.
But why would you want to?
I would have a difficult time respecting anyone that placed such a small value on oaths they take. How likely will he be to honor his word if he's initiated into your house?
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Kath and I have discussed this so I'm going to share some of her viewpoints as well as my own. What I'm going to discuss mainly concerns transfer students who join one group at one school, transfer and join another group at a different school. Here are some points.
(1) Unless you've been through their initiation (which you haven't), you don't know what kind of oath they took with their first organization. So you don't know what kind of promise they're breaking, or even if they're breaking one at all. Which means that you probably shouldn't judge them for it.
(2) A lot of times people leave their original organization for good reasons. Would you expect somebody to keep a promise to an organization that treated them like isht?
(3) People make mistakes. People are allowed to remarry, and often people have unsuccessful first marriages but go onto have very successful second marriages, despite the fact that once they took a pledge to remain with someone "til death do them part" and broke it. And given that joining a GLO isn't as serious a commitment as a marriage (well, shouldn't be, at any rate), I don't see why GLO members shouldn't be given the same chance to make mistakes.
(4) Once you know what transferring is like, it's hard to judge people who do this. Nine times out of ten transferring SUCKS. Kath and I are both transfer students so we know. I don't regret coming to Wisconsin . . . but I also had friends from high school who were here already, made friends in the dorms, and pledged my sorority here -- and even so I still have trouble adjusting to the fact that I "lost" a year. A lot of transfer students (especially those who pledge at their first school) don't have any of those, and transferring can be really lonely. Joining a GLO is sometimes one of the only ways to make friends without working at it for six months. If it comes down to keeping someone out of my organization and simply because she already knows Gamma Phi's secret handshake, despite the fact that she will be lonely and miserable -- sorry, but I'm not into that.
(5) If you don't know anybody who's double-initiated, it's hard to understand why they do it. I do know people who have done it, and I understand why. I know a girl that said, "XYZ [the second sorority she initiated into] saved my life and I'm scared of where I might be without them." Sororities can help people deal with a lot of things that they might not be able to deal with on their own: depression, rape, death of a loved one . . .
If that isn't what sisterhood is really about, I don't know what is.
Sure, I don't advocate double initiation in every case that it comes up. But I think you are taking your GLO a little too seriously if you judge a person's character by a GLO oath that you assumed they made at a time when they were probably at a very different stage in their life than they are now at.