DKS opinion writer Kyle Lindemann has caught no end of flak for his recent columns “Nice guys don’t get girls” and “I’m not your boyfriend, baby.” Terms such as “chauvinistic,” “childish” and “sexist” have been thrown around with reckless abandon.

Yet Lindemann’s columns consistently get extremely high feedback from the DKS/KentWired readership. It seems that sex(ism) sells.

It should go without saying that the opinion page is just that: a broad offering of differing views. The opinion page is not news, nor does it claim to be. However, the Daily Kent Stater has received numerous complaints about the lack of news value and journalistic integrity of Lindemann’s columns and several attacks on the credibility of the paper as a whole. What people need to understand is that they are not meant to agree with everything in the editorial section of a newspaper. Controversial views are to be encouraged, not browbeaten and followed with attacks on the publication they appear in.

Even more concerning is how a response column written by enterprise reporter Courtney Kerrigan, which was meant to provide rebuttal to Lindemann’s arguments, was all but ignored. “I’m not your boyfriend, baby” currently boasts 983 hits, 43 ratings and 26 comments. Kerrigan’s “Subjectivity at its finest,” on the other hand, has received a relatively meager 123 hits, 2 ratings and no comments. If Kent State students were truly concerned with intelligent discourse, perhaps they could show it by encouraging educated debate instead of circular griping.

Not all opinions are insightful, and not all opinions are fantastically articulate, but it’s a dark day indeed when an opinion is deemed utterly invalid due to its popularity.