It seems to me that what used to be termed “civ­il soci­ety” has slid into the abyss that is its antithe­sis. The blame could be attrib­uted to the myr­i­ad stress­es and strains the mod­ern world impos­es on a dai­ly basis, includ­ing too many choic­es. How­ev­er, the crux of the mat­ter, I think, is the lack of a sin­gle adjec­tive: mutu­al.

The three things we all want, and have every right to expect, are tol­er­ance, under­stand­ing and respect. None can be attained or indeed need  be grant­ed in toto unless they are shared.
The Chris­t­ian sum­ma­tion of that is the so-called “Gold­en Rule” attrib­uted to Jesus in the Ser­mon on the Mount: “Do unto oth­ers as you would have them do unto you.”
So how did it come to pass that his adher­ents often seem to pre­dom­i­nate when it comes to intolerance?
Protes­tants are split among scores of denom­i­na­tions, each of which holds itself as the one true ver­sion of faith. They’ve been at war the­o­log­i­cal­ly and occa­sion­al­ly by force of arms for centuries. 
The Catholic half of the Chris­t­ian schism is frac­tured into sev­er­al “church­es” or “rites” still wag­ing age-old griev­ances. Vladimir Putin used the birth­place of the Russ­ian Ortho­dox church as one of his spu­ri­ous pre­texts for invad­ing Ukraine.
In a less vio­lent but no less insid­i­ous degree, “evan­gel­i­cal” and oth­er would-be Chris­tians wield claims of unas­sail­able virtue to slight the LGBT com­mu­ni­ty, and sup­port politi­cians who pro­pose laws that vic­timise and even per­se­cute its members.
When  Pope Fran­cis, whom it’s fair to say can lay claim to being a devout adher­ent to Chris­t­ian dog­ma said of homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, “Who am I to judge?”, he all but rel­e­gat­ed intol­er­ance of it to a sin­ful level.

                                    BOTH SIDES

Bal­anc­ing the scale, why is it those who fit into the acronym LGBT – and many oth­er vari­ants, includ­ing among oth­ers 2SLGBTQ+, LGBTQI2S, LGBTTQQIAAP -– can be offend­ed by those among us who neither meet nor in many cas­es even under­stand the cat­e­gories, but insist that peo­ple who see gen­der as bio­log­i­cal­ly deter­mined be referred to by the invent­ed cat­e­go­ry “cis”?
The les­son for both sides is summed up in the phrase “give the dev­il his due”, from Shakespeare’s ‘Hen­ry V Part 1’. Tak­en lit­er­al­ly it means pay the dev­il what he’s owed. Fig­u­ra­tive­ly, it trans­lates as an oblig­a­tion to acknowl­edge the pos­i­tive qual­i­ties in peo­ple or ideas one may not like. Not an easy task, but sure­ly not insur­mount­able with a lit­tle effort and imagination.
A mod­ern exam­ple of apply­ing bal­ance and mutu­al respect (of a sort) has been fig­ured out by the Office of Equi­ty, Diver­si­ty, and Inclu­sion at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh. Appli­cants for a “Tal­ent Cen­ter” posi­tion now have thir­teen “gen­der choices” . 
In alpha­bet­i­cal order: Agen­der, Female/Woman, Gen­derqueer, Gen­der Flu­id, Gen­der Non-Con­form­ing, Inter­gen­der, Inter­sex, Male/Man, Non­bi­na­ry, Oth­er, Trans­gen­der, Trans Man/Male, Trans Woman/Female.
Any­one whose under­stand­ing of the fore­go­ing ranges like mine from “I don’t care” to “I have no idea what most of them mean”, has option 14: “I do not wish to pro­vide this information.”
Even those among us non-plussed by the neces­si­ty for the whole con­glom­er­a­tion, the opt-out option is a good one to apply to the “woke” dilem­ma, which on avail­able evi­dence is mired in a stand­off in which doubt­ing or debat­ing the con­cept (or more accu­rate­ly creed), is out of the ques­tion and the “oth­er side” is either evil, or stu­pid or both, depend­ing on one’s lev­el of civility.
To book ban­ning zealots whose vocab­u­lary is often as lim­it­ed as their read­ing lists, for exam­ple, it’s a pejo­ra­tive to be shout­ed. One won­ders if they realise refus­ing to coun­te­nance mutu­al ground with more open-mind­ed fel­low coun­try­men, means shar­ing men­tal space with the Afghan Tal­iban, whose restric­tions recent­ly forced the clo­sure of an all-women library in Kabul.
The our-way-or-the-high­way mind­set is what makes it so ludi­crous­ly dif­fi­cult for Amer­i­cans to find mutu­al agree­ment on the seem­ing­ly obvi­ous rea­son­able­ness of wait­ing until peo­ple are of an age to be con­sid­ered mature enough to legal­ly drink, before let­ting them buy an AR-15 and decide who they might feel like killing.
Far bet­ter to let mutu­al frus­tra­tions be vent­ed by gestures.
Last Feb­ru­ary, a judge in Que­bec acquit­ted a man charged with crim­i­nal harass­ment for giv­ing the fin­ger to a neigh­bour with whom he was at odds.
In an appar­ent ref­er­ence to the Cana­di­an Char­ter of Rights and Free­doms, Judge Den­nis Gali­at­satos said: “Flip­ping the prover­bial bird is a God-giv­en, Char­ter-enshrined right that belongs to every red-blood­ed Cana­di­an. It may not be civ­il, it may not be polite, it may not be gen­tle­man­ly. Nev­er­the­less, it does not trig­ger crim­i­nal liability.”
Rude is decid­ed­ly not the way any­one ought to be if we are to have a civ­il soci­ety, but as the judge ruled, it cuts both ways, which is more than can be said for most social dis­course at the moment.

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