Respect as political tool

Our UU minister gave his Martin Luther King Day sermon this morning.  Early on, he said having White and Colored drinking fountains was crazy.  He went on to praise MLK’s nonviolent methods, and cautioned himself and us to watch our tone when working for social change.  He said being snarky is not helpful when we want to persuade.

Isn’t it snarky to call something crazy?  Why is one ok and the other isn’t?  He gave us the answer:  we’re not always trying to persuade.  No one is worried about losing support from segregationists because that political battle has largely been won.  In 1950, we had to show some respect for established culture in the South.  We can now call segregation crazy.

To call God a segregationist is still snarky, but not because it’s untrue.  It’s because we still need to work with believers.  No one cares about losing support of Raelians or Heaven’s Gate cultists.  (Perhaps we should be.  There are some UFO believers in our congregation.)  We can say they’re crazy, but not because their ideas are more crazy.  They’re crazy because we don’t need to be persuasive to them.  Because they are not politically powerful.

So it seems admonitions about ‘tone’ and ‘snarkiness’ are primarily pragmatic and political, and have little to do with whether something is true or giving respect.

We know crazy when we see it, but we don’t apply our senses evenly.  When someone in power is crazy, we modulate what we say, and apply social pressure to make others do the same.  We may even doubt our own judgment.  This is pragmatic and avoids conflict, and few seem to care that evenhandedness suffers as a result.  But on MLK Day, I hope you can see the irony that King couldn’t.  He said:

“Segregation is wrong because it assumes that God made a mistake and stamped upon certain men an eternal stigma of shame because of the color of their skin.”

If only skin color were the only thing that made life unfair.  The circumstances of birth, whether a child is male or female, full-term or premature, inoculated or not will always make sure equality remains a dream.  What system could be more unfair than the one God instituted when creating the earth?  Using any God as the basis to declare segregation evil is laughable, but many of us can not say so, yet.  But not because it’s not laughable.  Only because we still must work with religious segregationists, good people who don’t yet see their God as a cosmic Bull Connor.

So we have a double standard.  Is that so terrible?  I suppose it depends.  If we are merely trying to persuade people, to market to them, it might be ok to tell people only what helps achieve that.  But if we want their informed consent, we shouldn’t settle for double standards.  We should be honest when our treatment of ideas is not determined by their merit, but by the political power of those who hold them.