It's time for both sides of the keycard debate to start talking about what they've really been talking about all the time: a last-ditch attempt by House Masters to show support for limited parietal rules.

Or, to be more blunt, sex and booze.

Neither side can really believe that universal keycard access (UKA), or the lack thereof, will make students more or less safe. There's no way the students who have been pressuring the Committee on House Life to expand UKA past its current 1 a.m. cutoff have the safety of their fellows at heart.

For students, the security argument provides a band-aid of respectability for their true aim--gaining the ability for any student to visit any other student, no matter the hour.

Supporters of UKA argue that a student who feels uncomfortable in the dead of night should rest easy knowing the doors of any of Harvard's 12 Houses will click open for them. This "safe space" argument is hard for Masters and administrators (who have for years blocked UKA in the name of security) to counter. They have to admit that students know a little more than they about how it feels to wander the streets of Cambridge at 3 a.m.

The students' security argument is a good one, in theory. But in reality, the ability to get into a House in the dead of night (or, on the other hand, the inability to do so) has not once been linked to the outcome of an on-campus crime situation. Blue-light phones, accessible to all, dot the campus, providing a potentially nervous student a quick hotline to safety no matter the green light-red light status of the nearest House.

Masters' arguments against UKA, while perhaps originally more grounded in student safety, are now even more specious than their opponents'. For years, Masters said they feared access would cut down on the number of locked, heavy doors between their charges and the scary outside world, potentially opening their Houses to unwanted persons and crime.

But these claims have been undermined by an uneventful experimentation with UKA until 1 a.m. If there is still any doubt, it is hard to ignore the example of Quincy House, where Master Michael A. Shinagel has steadfastly kept his doors primed for all Harvard ID's all through the night for the past several months, with no noticeable increase in crime.