{"id":66,"date":"2013-01-21T03:20:43","date_gmt":"2013-01-20T21:20:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/?p=66"},"modified":"2013-01-21T03:20:43","modified_gmt":"2013-01-20T21:20:43","slug":"respect-as-political-tool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/2013\/01\/21\/respect-as-political-tool\/","title":{"rendered":"Respect as political tool"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Our UU minister gave his Martin Luther King Day sermon this morning.\u00a0 Early on, he said having White and Colored drinking fountains was crazy.\u00a0 He went on to praise MLK’s nonviolent methods, and cautioned himself and us to watch our tone when working for social change. \u00a0He said being snarky is not helpful when we want to persuade.<\/span><\/p>\n

Isn\u2019t it snarky to call something crazy?\u00a0 Why is one ok and the other isn\u2019t?\u00a0 He gave us the answer:\u00a0 we\u2019re not always trying to persuade.\u00a0 No one is worried about losing support from segregationists because that political battle has largely been won.\u00a0 In 1950, we had to show some respect for established culture in the South.\u00a0 We can now call segregation crazy.<\/p>\n

To call God a segregationist is still snarky, but not because it\u2019s untrue.\u00a0 It\u2019s because we still need to work with believers.\u00a0 No one cares about losing support of Raelians or Heaven\u2019s Gate cultists.\u00a0 (Perhaps we should be.\u00a0 There are some UFO believers in our congregation.)\u00a0 We can say they\u2019re crazy, but not because their ideas are more crazy.\u00a0 They\u2019re crazy because we don\u2019t need to be persuasive to them.\u00a0 Because they are not politically powerful.<\/p>\n

So it seems admonitions about \u2018tone\u2019 and \u2018snarkiness\u2019 are primarily pragmatic and political, and have little to do with whether something is true or giving respect.<\/p>\n

We know crazy when we see it, but we don\u2019t apply our senses evenly.\u00a0 When someone in power is crazy, we modulate what we say, and apply social pressure to make others do the same. \u00a0We may even doubt our own judgment. \u00a0This is pragmatic and avoids conflict, and few seem to care that evenhandedness suffers as a result.\u00a0 But on MLK Day, I hope you can see the irony that King couldn\u2019t. \u00a0He said:<\/p>\n

\u201cSegregation 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

If only skin color were the only thing that made life unfair.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 What system could be more unfair than the one God instituted when creating the earth?\u00a0 Using any God as the basis to declare segregation evil is laughable, but many of us can not say so, yet.\u00a0 But not because it\u2019s not laughable.\u00a0 Only because we still must work with religious segregationists, good people who don\u2019t yet see their God as a cosmic Bull Connor.<\/p>\n

So we have a double standard.\u00a0 Is that so terrible?\u00a0 I suppose it depends.\u00a0 If we are merely trying to persuade people, to market to them, it might be ok to tell people only what helps achieve that.\u00a0 But if we want their informed consent, we shouldn\u2019t settle for double standards.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our UU minister gave his Martin Luther King Day sermon this morning.\u00a0 Early on, he said having White and Colored drinking fountains was crazy.\u00a0 He went on to praise MLK’s nonviolent methods, and cautioned himself and us to watch our tone when working for social change. \u00a0He said being snarky is not helpful when we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}