Reader PietB, bless his heart, has come up with another e-mail that deserves aknowledgment and discussion:
I read this morning's post and was thinking that the people Dreher was talking about are the very people who most need to learn a little manners. My housemate was at the nursery the other day and some woman was talking with him about the bedding plants he was buying. The conversation eventually got around to the fact that he wasn't married, wasn't divorced, did have a housemate, and was in fact a -- gasp -- homosexual, at which point she began to loudly and insistently recommend that he take Jesussss Chrisssst as his personal savior because that would bring him into a right relationship with Gawd and keep him from burning in the eternal flames of Helllll. In the middle of a plant nursery on a bright, chilly day in late March. At the top of her lungs. Apparently she kept pressing him about religious issues: why did he reject Jeezusss, why did he not go to a Christian church now when he had gone to one as a younger man, why did he insist on being one of those homosectionals, etc., and at one point she proclaimed that she couldn't believe he was really one of those homosexionated people because he was "so nice".
Of course, the reaction I have to all this is to be completely horrified by the lack of good manners displayed. And I wonder why it is that modern evangelicals can't see the rudeness of their approach. I guess that having been brought up in an anti-proselytizing religion makes me cringe even more than I would if my particular childhood church had been neutral (much less a proselytizing sect), but that just seems so ill-bred and wrong. And of course that is the very thing they fear. They don't really fear censorship; they fear that their active and insistent proselytizing in all sorts of improper settings will be criticized and labelled for what it is: rude, intrusive, arrogant, condescending, stupid, and wrong. And they are probably not even consciously aware of what the actual fear is, which is even more telling.
I've had similar experiences. The one that sticks most in my mind is an incident in which I was approached in a fairly deserted subway station one night by a smiling young man who was determined to save me. I said, quite politely, that I wasn't really interested. (I am, believe it or not, a very polite person in the normal course of events, particularly with strangers. It just works better.) He persisted, until I finally lost patience and told him that 1) I am a practicing and very devout Witch,* and 2) if he didn't go away and stop harassing me, I was going to call a cop.
A couple of issues here: "common courtesy" is, as I pointed out in the post that Piet's referring to, the grease that keeps the wheels of society turning smoothly. The last portion of Piet's post hits this one square on the head: rather than admit that they have no respect for other human beings at all, much less differing viewpoints, they'd rather claim persecution for their religious beliefs -- i.e., if their ability to condemn others loudly and publicly for not sharing those beliefs brings repercussions, they are being deprived of their "rights." As I noted in the earlier post:
Yeah, if you feel the need to constantly express your disapproval of those around you, you're going to be marginalized -- not because of your beliefs, but because you don't have the civility to keep them to yourself when expressing them is inappropriate.
For crying out loud -- if someone asks you nicely to go away and stop bothering them, do it, for the love of all that's holy. And if you don't approve of something you learn about a total stranger, why on earth would you feel bound to inform them of the fact? As though they care -- you're no one to them -- except now you are obnoxious and offensive, having gone out of your way to hurt their feelings.
The point of this is that courtesy is much more than window dressing: it is a fundmental and very important part of making a society work. "Courtesy" is much more substantial than mere "manners," although we use the two terms almost interchangeably. "Courtesy" implies respect for others, it implies that one values others and recognizes their legitimate place in the order of things. It is, to all intents and purposes, something that one can easily include among one's values -- it is a motivating force for dealing benignly with one's fellows. "Manners" are just the forms for expressing that, and, as is too often the case, the forms can take the place of the substance (which is something I find true of so-called Christian "morality" -- morality also grows from respect and honest caring, but you won't find indications of that in the propaganda of the anti-gay, "Christian" right -- lip service is the best they can come up with).
Vis-a-vis so-called "Christians" and their propensity for knee-jerk condemnations of those who don't agree with them, it's another facet of something that is widespread in the evangelical/fundamentalist movement: they serve a higher purpose, so mere human considerations -- not to mention ordinary standards of morality and decency, including their own -- are beneath notice. Hence someone like James Dobson or Tony Perkins can quite comfortably lie about gay people in the national media because they are doing God's work. One wonders what God would say about that. I seem to remember a saying from somewhere: "Evil done in God's name is not God's work."
And of course, this all comes into focus in their opposition to treating gays as human beings in any regard. There are, of course, the purely political considerations -- which as far as I can determine, form the major part of their purpose -- which their moral posturing and claims of persecution merely serve. (And no one has yet explained to me how a religion that claims 80% of the population and whose followers have controlled the government for at least the last twenty years can claim to be "persecuted.")
The bottom line here is that if some stranger comes up to me and starts haranguing me about my sinful life, and they don't go away when I ask them to, I'm calling a cop.
* A note on this, at the risk of getting personal: My religion is something that I embraced relatively late in life, after a great deal of introspection and, to put it plainly, prayer. It was like coming home. I'm not changing. Period. It fits me, it accepts who I am -- and not just my sexual orientation, but my whole personality and point of view, my whole way of engaging with the world -- and provides a constant and strong foundation for the ongoing series of moral choices that is my daily life. It's not an easy religion to follow, but it suits me. Just as one example, the story of the Lord willingly offering Himself at Samhain and entering the Underworld moves me to tears, which is something the story of the Crucifixion, with its focus on cruelty and brutality -- and politics -- never did. There is an element of joy mixed with the sadness in our version that I never really saw in the Christian version, even though both look forward to His return.
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