Cavedon said he speculates the shift resulted from a need for some “ethical mooring” to persuade people that abstinence was an acceptable lifestyle.

“They tried to give their beliefs an intellectual foundation, which, in my opinion, was probably a smart move,” he said.

Rachel L. Wagley ’11, who served as TLR president from her sophomore to senior year, agreed with Cavedon that as TLR members were often questioned about their minority view, they needed a reason to give when asked why they believed in abstinence. That included defining marriage itself.

“If you’re holding out for marriage, you have to talk about what marriage is,” said Wagley, who was also involved in the Harvard Republican Club and Christian Impact. “You essentially get into all these side issues that we eventually decided were not just side issues.”

Wagley first announced TLR’s new platform through an email sent over the group’s mailing list in September 2009. In her message, she prefaced the new position statements by acknowledging that they could make TLR more “controversial” but that they “put the value of abstinence in a more intellectual context.”

“Abstinence doesn’t justify itself,” Wagley said.

WHAT WOULD THE FOUNDERS SAY?

Students who were on the TLR executive board prior to 2009 said that they feel the organization’s current positions do not align with what it was originally intended to do.

“The reason that the original founders didn’t want to have positions like these was because they wanted people to focus on the practical issues such as ‘Do I have sex on a one-night stand or not?’—not to make a decision on whether homosexuals can get married or not,” Syski said.

Mancuso said that though TLR had several discussions about those topics in her day, the organization steered clear of public positions.

“It wasn’t originally something exclusive or homophobic,” Mancuso said. “When I was on the board, they welcomed queer people to the meetings, and welcomed people who were sexually active. It really wasn’t a judgmental space.”

Wagley, on the other hand, said that the pro-abstinence nature of TLR was not her primary focus when leading the group. “None of us were in the club because we believed in abstinence. That wasn’t our perspective on it,” she said. “Abstinence is related to pre-marital sex which is related to marriage, the traditional household, and feminism.”

She added, “I didn’t see it as a safe space at all. It wasn’t a support club.”

Jim P. McGlone ’15, a current Anscombe Society board member, echoed this statement. “The goal is to encourage discourse on these issues and to provide an intellectual and philosophical explanation for many of the views that we hold,” he said.

Students not directly affiliated with the Anscombe Society said that they see the organization as having a conservative bent.