This may be hard to believe, but there was a time when “the school of hard knocks” was con­sid­ered as good as a for­mal edu­ca­tion. Today, expe­ri­enc­ing and learn­ing from the vicis­si­tudes of life has been replaced by metaphor­i­cal­ly swad­dling peo­ple in cot­ton wool and pro­vid­ing them with ear plugs and blinkers.
The ‘han­dle with kid gloves and pro­tect every­one from every­thing’ men­tal­i­ty was summed up neat­ly by a restau­rant that can­celled a book­ing for a con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian orga­ni­za­tion opposed to same-sex mar­riage and abor­tion rights.
The restau­rant own­ers jus­ti­fied their action on the grounds that “many of our staff are women and/or mem­bers of the LGBTQ+ com­mu­ni­ty”. The man­age­ment was striv­ing “to cre­ate a work envi­ron­ment where they can do their jobs with dig­ni­ty, com­fort and safety.”
No men­tion was made of what threat the din­ers might pose, but it’s hard to imag­ine it would be any­thing except imaginary.
How, pray tell me, does what a cus­tomer thinks, oth­er than whether or not the food and ser­vice are up to stan­dard, mat­ter a damn to restau­rant staff? If cus­tomers don’t ques­tion or com­plain about the staff’s polit­i­cal beliefs, sex­u­al pref­er­ences or any oth­er per­son­al choic­es oth­er than hygiene, why should the staff care what the clien­tele believe, wor­ship, vote for or support?
If you’ve ever had a job that entailed serv­ing the pub­lic, you know that it mat­ters less who the cus­tomer is, than how you deal with them. It’s how you earn tips, for starters.
The inci­dent was com­pared to a patron being evict­ed from a New York bar for wear­ing a MAGA hat. In that case a judge ruled in favour of the estab­lish­ment. I’m all for refus­ing ser­vice to peo­ple who wear hats indoors, but on the grounds of eti­quette, not politics.

                        WHAT REALLY MATTERS

I know what all the let­ters in LGBTQ stand for, although how and why I’m sup­posed to intu­it which one applies to some­one with whom I am inter­act­ing escapes me.
Sure­ly, all I need to care about is whether a per­son is hon­est, polite, con­sid­er­ate of oth­ers, and, if I am in the U.S., car­ry­ing a gun. (My default set­ting would be to assume yes, which is sad in and of itself.)
Apart from that, I don’t see why I should be expect­ed to assess or treat a per­son dif­fer­ent­ly based on things that are none of my busi­ness. On that score, I am non-plussed by con­stant­ly being told some­one is the first “open­ly gay” per­son in such-and-such a position.
And before the vitu­per­a­tion begins – yes, I know LGBTQ peo­ple have been and are insult­ed and dis­crim­i­nat­ed against. I admire and sup­port their long strug­gle against it.
I just hap­pen to think that not every action and inter­ac­tion in life relates to it.
It ought to cut both ways, of course. And of course, it doesn’t.

                          FAITH IS NOT AN EXCUSE

Wrap­ping up under a cloak of “God and the Bible” to deal with oth­er points of view, beliefs or lifestyles is a con­ve­nient way of dis­guis­ing big­otry and prej­u­dice. Per­haps worse in reli­gious terms, it flies in the face of one of the best-known and oft-quot­ed (in var­i­ous forms) admo­ni­tions cred­it­ed to Jesus: “Let he who is with­out sin cast the first stone…” (Gospel of John 8:7)
Yet, as a mat­ter of course, evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians deride, dis­dain and try to sup­press any­thing in oth­er people’s lifestyles that doesn’t fit their own nar­row and struc­tured worldview.
The “tar­get du jour” in their hymn book is drag queens.
Accord­ing to a report in the New York Times, drag shows “have become an increas­ing­ly tense and armed front­line in recent months in the nation’s fraught strug­gle over gen­der and identity.”
Again, if it’s not ille­gal but you don’t like it, don’t watch it.
Andrew Walk­er, an ethi­cist at the South­ern Bap­tist The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary summed up the drag show furore this way: “As sil­ly as this debate is, it’s also moral­ly seri­ous in its own way. For a lot of Chris­tians, they look and see a cul­ture that has no moral limits.”
That’s a bit of a stretch, con­sid­er­ing evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians, whose val­ues are based on a lit­er­al inter­pre­ta­tion of the Bible, see noth­ing wrong in sup­port­ing politi­cians whose moral com­pass –if they indeed have one — only points to perdition.
Free­dom of reli­gion and thought means you can wor­ship any­thing you want. Using it to impose your beliefs on any­one else is noth­ing short of pernicious.
To counter, rather than be offend­ed by peo­ple who don’t under­stand that, it’s use­ful to bear in mind that the high­er the vol­ume of vit­ri­ol, the low­er the intel­lect from which it stems.
Like school­yard bul­lies, zealots and politi­cians who rant, rave and con­demn, act out of a deep-seat­ed sense of insecurity.
Con­fi­dence and intel­li­gence don’t need unbri­dled aggres­sion, or noise.
Call that “Hard Knocks 101”.

Com­ments are wel­comed. Click CONTACT on the site header.
To receive e‑mail alerts to new posts, Click SIGN-UP on the header.