Having A Ball At The Broadmoor

Curious media types descended from Denver, and around the globe, to cover last weekend’s eighth annual Father-Daughter Purity Ball at the 5-star Broadmoor hotel in Colorado Springs. It’s an evening where girls and young women, dressed in ball gowns, pledge their purity to their tux-wearing dads. That’s right. No sex – not even a kiss – until marriage. The fathers, meanwhile, vow to be their daughters’ protectors.

The Rocky Mountain News wrote a long story about the ball on Saturday. And, as Daniel Brogan from the Denver magazine 5280 subsequently pointed out, tongue firmaly in cheek, it would appear that “someone at the paper wasn’t entirely clear on the purity concept” when they came up with this amusing subhead for the story:

Some Travelled to Ball

Keep reading.Such purity balls actually landed squarely in the consciousness of the mainstream when Glamour magazine published an extensive story about the phenomenon last year.

As the magazine noted, “the event’s purpose is, in part, to celebrate dad-daughter bonding, but the main agenda is for fathers to vow to protect the girls’ chastity until they marry and for the daughters to promise to stay pure.”

Or, as Randy Wilson, the cofounder of the ball, puts it to the fathers, “Are you ready to war for your daughters’ purity?”

Dozens of these lavish events are held every year, mainly in the South and Midwest, from Tucson to Peoria and New Orleans, sponsored by churches, nonprofit groups and crisis pregnancy centers,” the magazine noted.

The Glamour story can be read in full by clicking here.

Cara DeGette is a senior fellow at Colorado Confidential and a columnist and contributing editor at the Colorado Springs Independent. E-mail her at cdegette@coloradoconfidential.com