Don't like BYU? Then don't join the club

College basketball has its own little culture war now. With BYU's suspension of standout sophomore Brandon Davies, the hot parley between opposing voices regarding the school's strict honor code is at full rage.

That BYU would expect its students to "live a chaste and virtuous life" - and would enforce the rule when Davies acknowledged having consensual sex with his girlfriend - has been called everything from courageous to hypocritical.

Davies committed no crime, BYU officials agreed. And much of the moralizing over the relative severity of his act, and the subsequent punishment, draws a comparison to this week's Sports Illustrated / CBS investigation that revealed that more than 200 college football players (including almost a quarter of Pitt's varsity) had been in trouble with the law. Ergo: Why shouldn't Davies be allowed to play on?

Tangled up with such an argument over "fairness," of course, is the pure fans' take, noting the bad timing of Davies' loss to a team currently ranked No. 3 in the nation and apparently positioned for a deep run through this month's NCAA Tournament. A Yahoo.com post asked if "getting lucky with your girlfriend [is] really so heinous a crime that the school is willing to blow its team's dream season . . . ?"

In fact, BYU stands to lose not only significant basketball-only happy news but substantial sums of money. As a member of the Mountain West Conference, its NCAA Tournament payout should be a share of roughly $4 million - and would increase with on-court success.

That's why several commentators see Davies' suspension as a risk worthy of praising BYU officials for effectively playing against type: No exception to a university rule just because Davies is a highly visible and productive athlete.

Still, it is the BYU code - itself an exception to the rule of jock entitlement and general American mores - that has triggered most of the foaming-at-the-mouth outrage.

The code, which (among other things) calls for abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, tea and coffee, is "an outdated and overzealous piety system . . . and enforces that which [BYU] has no business enforcing," wrote AllmediaNY editor-in-chief Jorge Vargas, who likened Davies' ban to "public stonings" and declared the honor-code authors "should read the Bible again. They clearly missed the finer points."

One strong rant against the school's "double standard," asserting that BYU's primary intent in disciplining Davies was a form of holier-than-thou posturing, loses most of its punch because it was written anonymously by a "journalist who attended BYU from 1997 to 2001" and appeared on the controversial website Deadspin, which boasts of supplying sports news "without access, favor or discretion."

That BYU is owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and that Mormonism is something of a mystery to most Americans, contributes to the understanding gap over BYU's code. Mormons, for instance, still hear themselves connected to polygamy, though that practice was officially discontinued in 1890.

So that old, old news - juxtaposed with BYU's insistence that its students be celibate while studies say 70 percent of Americans have sex by the age of 19 - further confuses the issue.

"People across the country might think this is foreign. They are shocked and surprised," BYU athletic director Tom Holmoe said of the honor code during a formal news conference last week. "We live this. This is who we are."

Foreign or not, this would seem easy for anyone to comprehend: BYU, a club of sorts, has club rules. All those who choose to belong to that club (Davies included) sign up for its rules, fully aware that breaking the rules could get them thrown out of the club. And if they're not, what are the other club members - who've also taken the club's oath - supposed to think?