As I flipped through the radio dial the other day, I heard a conservative radio talk show host carrying on about what he seems to feel is a new form of immorality -- men and women living together at college. Not as lovers, mind you. This, I could understand, would implicate sexual morality (even those who don't believe in the concept have to admit that at least it would cause the meme to kick in). He was talking about roommates. He sounded quite annoyed about the idea that a young opposite sex couple might live together with neither romantic nor sexual involvement, and the calls he got from people doing that did nothing to dissuade him from the view that it was "immoral." (The fact that colleges allowed it particularly bothered him.)

What could be immoral about mere roommates? I wondered. Of course, his main objection did not seem to be to the uninvolved roommate situation, but the fact that it invited the possibility -- even probability -- of something more. Still, I could not understand an objection grounded in immorality to the situation of roommates. People are either involved or they are not, and if they are not, then by definition there cannot be sexual immorality.

I wondered, was his objection to the appearance of immorality? While I think that's quite a stretch, it might relate to a personal experience from back in 1973 when I was in college and I shared a house with one guy and two girls. There were no heterosexual involvements whatsoever, nor was there any homosexual involvement between the two women. The father of one of the girls, though, was indignant that his daughter was in a situation he considered immoral, and (much like the conservative radio guy I heard the other day), no amount of reassurances -- that his daughter was not a lesbian nor was she having sex with the guys -- would convince him otherwise.

Anyway, when I heard this radio tirade I was on my way to visit some friends who have a daughter in college, so I thought I'd ask them about this apparently "new" development. They said she lives in the dorm which is co-ed, and that opposite sex roommates were allowed, but had to be specifically requested. (Their daughter's roommate was female, of course.) The more I talked about this, the more I realized that many women consider males to generally have messy and annoying habits, and not too many would be willing to put up with a male roommate.

While my friends had no such worry, it did occur to me that some parents might have concerns about schools allowing opposite sex roommate situations, because it might activate "peer pressure." When I was young, I tried to defy peer pressure to the extent I could, so it's a little tough for me to understand parental concerns, but I do realize they are there, and might be an area for parental concern. (They do, after all, foot the bill for these social experiments, and I can see how they might be extremely pissed off if things didn't, um, work out.)

So, these thoughts crossed my mind, but for the time being, my quest to understand morality had not been solved, and I put on the back burner.

Yesterday, though, Glenn Reynolds linked something which introduced a new angle: "BRO-MANCE" -- defined as "the complicated love and affection shared by two straight males":

From "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" to "Good Will Hunting," popular culture is filled with examples of straight guy love. The sitcom "Friends" often crafted jokes around the ultratight nature of Joey and Chandler's relationship, and in the 2005 film "Wedding Crashers," Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson seemed to have something more like a tortured love affair than a friendship.

But close male friendship isn't just a quirky television fantasy or a running gag in the movies. Real-life bromances are everywhere. Kevin Collier, 26, a New Jersey construction manager, has lots of manly things in common with his best friend, including but not limited to, "tattoos, motorcycles and chicks," as Collier put it. But that hasn't stopped his friends from accusing him of having a "man crush" on his best friend Don Carlo-Clauss, 28, a semiprofessional fighter whose day job is in marketing.

They first met on the wrestling team at the University of Virginia. It was a bromance founded on shared misery. "When you spend six months out of the year being miserable together, you wind up with a lot of close relationships with your teammates," said Collier.

Experts say the prevalence of these friendships can in part be explained by the delay in major life milestones. Fifty years ago, a man could graduate from college, get a job and get married all within a couple of months. But today's men are drifting, as opposed to jumping, into the traditional notion of adulthood.

"The transition to adulthood is now taking about a decade longer than it used to," said Michael Kimmel, a sociology professor at Stony Brook University in New York whose upcoming book is called "Guy Land: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men." One set of men Kimmel interviewed for the book were fraternity brothers at Dartmouth College. Following graduation, seven of them squeezed into a two-bedroom apartment in Boston.

Financial pressures help fuel bromances because they make living with a roommate a sensible option. In addition, men are getting married later -- an average age of 27, according to a 2007 report by the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, up from the average marrying age of 23 in 1960. Men with more education are marrying even later, in their 30s.

David Popenoe, director of the marriage project and an emeritus professor of sociology at Rutgers, cited the acceptance of premarital sex and the greater numbers of men and women who live together as reasons for the delay in marriage.

According to Peter Nardi, a sociologist at Pitzer College who specializes in male friendships, all these phrases are safer than they used to be because men are less afraid of being perceived as gay. It has become more acceptable for them to show some emotion. Al Gore and Bill Clinton hugged when they won the 1992 election and sports figures cry on camera when they're busted for steroids, Nardi pointed out.

There seems to be little worry about perceptions of homosexuality in a bromance filled with macho pursuits like drinking beer, watching sports and playing video games. But rifts can occur when serious girlfriends enter the picture or someone moves to another city. Tipograph and Kopstein both have girlfriends and make it work.

Would young men seek female roommates simply to combat the appearance that they might be gay?

It sounds crazy, but I remember back in the 1970s, when San Francisco's gay mecca reputation had become an emergent cultural theme, famed San Francisco columnist Herb Caen noted a new anomaly (I'm paraphrasing here):

In the old days, men on a business trip would take a male secretary along to avoid gossip. Now, they take along female secretary to avoid gossip!

I have no way to know the answer, but I cannot help feeling sorry for people who would select roommates because of what other people might think. People who are that weak-willed probably need protection from themselves.

Still unsure how any of this involves morality, I decided to expand my inquiry from talk radio and talking with friends to the ultimate motherlode of all moral inquiries -- a Google search. Right away, I saw that opposite sex roommates are a major MSM meme right now. The Boston Globe has a piece called "Just roommates" and the phenomenon is being called "colleges' final frontier":

....some colleges are crossing the final threshold, allowing men and women to share rooms. At the urging of student activists, more than 30 campuses across the country have adopted what colleges call gender-neutral rooming assignments, almost half of them within the past two years.

Once limited to such socially liberal bastions as Hampshire College, Wesleyan University, and Oberlin College, mixed-gender housing has edged into the mainstream, although only a small fraction of students have taken advantage of the new policies so far. Clark and Dartmouth universities introduced mixed-gender rooms last fall, and Brown and Brandeis announced plans last month to follow suit.

The University of Pennsylvania, Skidmore and Ithaca colleges, and Oregon State University also allow roommates of different genders. Students at New York, Harvard, and Stanford universities, among many others, are calling for gender-blind dormitory rooms.

But what's not clear to me seems quite clear to others. Consider some of the verbal diarrhea that passes for dialogue:

[Jeffrey] Chang [a Clark student who has lived with a female friend] persuaded administrators over the past two years to adopt gender-neutral housing and co-founded the National Student Genderblind Campaign, which promotes the rooming option at colleges across the country. The campaign contends that traditional rooming policies wrongly assume that men and women cannot live together non-sexually and "needlessly reinforce an oppressive gender binary."

Originally instituted to create residential environments free from sexual tension, it is now apparent that same-sex housing policies were, and continue to be, based on traditionalist, heteronormative assumptions about sexuality. The remedy sought by such traditional policy is obviously unrealistic, as the reality of the situation is that couples of the same sex can officially live in the same room. Thus, a major claim in favor of conventional rooming policy is premised upon outdated rationale and should be challenged. Furthermore, while traditional gender-segregated policy is intended to eliminate sexual tension, in practicality it forces non-heterosexual students into rooming arrangements that may potentially be riddled with sexual discord.

Or is the goal to create a better world of sexless beings who have no thoughts of a sexual nature?

It strikes me that once again, common sense is being lost. I see no reason why any college cannot accommodate students who feel "sexual tension" -- for whatever reason -- over their roommates, by simply helping them find another roommate. But activists want to turn the world inside out to advance their agendas, and they excel at making so much noise that people appease them so they don't have to listen to them. (By the way, "Genderblind" is by no means being treated as kooky fringe outfit; the group is also featured in a major piece in the Christian Science Monitor.)

Fortunately (so far, at least) these "gender neutral" programs seem to be offered as an "option." Genderblind praises Stanford for theirs.

But my experience with activists has taught me that "optional" has a way of becoming mandatory. I can remember when non-smoking was merely an option. When spaying or neutering your pet was an option. Activists tend to see "optional" as a foot in the door. * (Anyone who thinks, for example, that vegans are comfortable with the "option" of sitting down and eating a vegan meal with meat-eaters should think again.)

Of course, if this idea ever goes mandatory, there might also be religious objections -- only some of which tend to be "accommodated." (It would not surprise me to see Muslim parents objecting more loudly than Christian parents, but I guess that's off topic.)

This has turned out to be crazier than I thought it was when I started.

Don't blame me; I only wanted to explore the moral issue as logically as I could, and I'm more confused than ever.

(The damn activists always seem to get in the way.)

* It's an "activist-compliance cycle" and it generally goes like this. First come the activists -- usually obsessive busybodies hell-bent on telling other people what to do. With help from the appeasers, the activists manage to bully a constantly expanding group of compliers. Finally, the recalcitrant holdouts are forced along, by now angry compliers who are tired of having to do the right thing while the insolent recalcitrants indulge themselves with the increasingly endangered behavior -- which by that time has come to be seen as "immoral."

While this phenomenon might also be called the "morality cycle," I don't want to use that label, for it implies that morality is something to be manufactured by activists.

UPDATE: Regarding the word "bro-mance," I just received an email:

I am so sick of this need to attach tag-names to perfectly normal phenomena. What crap. So nice to know that is "OK" for two guys to be friends! These fu-king people have way too much time on their hands and need to mind their own business.

A sensible suggestion, to be sure.

But what if they have no business of their own to mind?