It’s a “pick and choose” morality, as one selects the
ethical items they want and discards and ignores others. It’s not limited to morality, either, as
rules and laws can also be selected as if at a buffet line. And like the buffet, you can take an item on
the first go around, then not take it the next time. Lack of consistency is another key to this
type of morality.
Like I said earlier, most people live their lives this
way. Some only dabble in the buffet
line, while others feast. A good many
people have standards, and keep them, only diverging a little from time to
time. Upstanding, decent folks, they
perhaps only cheat at tax time and maybe they steal a few office pens from time
to time. Maybe they speed on the
interstate or toss litter from the car.
Some folks are a bit less ethical, as cheating comes as natural to them
as walking. They cheat their kids, their
spouse, their boss, the government…pretty much everyone they come in contact
with.
Then there are those
who are just confused about their morality.
They think they are the untainted ones, the ones who are closest to
perfection, and it’s everyone else who needs to get it line. They know they are pure in heart and deed,
and have the strictest moral code there can be.
Except they just don’t follow it.
Smörgåsbord morality.
Smörgåsbord morality
was on full display this week in Arizona.
The now-vetoed SB 1062, a bill passed by the legislature previously that
would have allowed private businesses to cite religious beliefs as a defense
against lawsuits over discriminatory treatment (author’s note – I copied this
line directly from The
Economist), was flawed from the start.
No, not because it discriminated, and let’s stop there for a moment and
discuss this word – discrimination – as few understand it.
You WANT to be able to discriminate.
That is, you want to have the ability to tell one thing apart from
another, to recognize a distinction. You
want to pick a good beer from a bad one, a stylish shirt from a unstylish one,
a good haircut from a bad one, a good woman…go get the idea. Discrimination is a talent, and in a poker
game you want the ability to discriminate a good starting hand from a lousy
one.
What you DON’T want to do is mass discrimination, which in reality isn’t
very discriminate at all. If you lump in
all people of one type (gays, Latinos, women, Evangelicals, short guys with bad
shirts and lousy haircuts), you aren’t discriminating – you’re classifying. Piss-poorly, I might add. You’re basing your “discrimination” on a bias
that only differentiates the other class from you on one factor. Color.
Nationality. Heritage. Sexual preference. Etc.
So back to SB 1062 – to me, here’s the key portion of the bill (under Provisions): This bill…
Stipulates
that a person that asserts a violation of this Act must establish the
following:
Ø The
person’s action or refusal to act is motivated by a religious belief;Ø The person’s religious belief is sincerely held; and
Ø The state action substantially burdens the exercise of the person’s religious beliefs.
Got that? Action (or inaction) motivated
by a sincerely held religious belief. And this is where the bill fails for me. If a
baker wants to refuse to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple, because of a
sincerely held religious belief (and here I am assuming we’re talking
Christian, because the next few examples all come from the same “book” of
ethics where the anti-gay thingy comes from), then he should also not bake a
cake for:
- A couple where one (or both) have tattoos
- A couple wearing clothing from two different fabrics
- A couple who have committed adultery (good luck with that one)
- A couple who have pork or shellfish on the catering list
- And, of course, if the couple is clean and pure, he can’t bake the cake
on Sunday.
In the smorgasbord of life, there is much to enjoy and much to choose
from. When we discriminate unfairly, we ruin
the meal for everyone.