The Rules of the Game

I am one of those folks who have radar for rules. It is one of the first revelations I had when I began therapy. I have rarely encountered a situation where there were none. Most often they are unspoken and you only discover them by breaking them. But humans are, I believe, highly rule-bound creatures.

Richard Fernandez ruminates on the rules of the Open Minded. No surprise to me, they are as numerous and as inflexible as anyone else's.

When Lady Gaga spoke at a rally in support of repealing the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy towards gays in the military, she said: “Our new law is called ‘If you don’t like it, go home!’” That kind of speech is described as a defense of tolerance.

Hate speech laws have been enacted by Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, the Council of Europe, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, India, Ireland, Jordan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Serbia, , Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. What you say and what you do, far from being your own business, is everywhere the public’s business. 

Morals legislation appears to be as pervasive as ever. Nothing in the current environment suggests there exist opinions on which you may not be lectured. The extent of what is out of bounds is growing all the time. What has changed is the contents of that proscribed area. It may now be a crime to quote the Bible. For example, in May of 2010 a British preacher was arrested for handing out leaflets saying that homosexuality was a sin... It is exactly the same process that might have occurred fifty years ago but with a policeman warning a homosexual he could not distribute leaflets advocating sodomy. What has changed isn’t that people are being warned off for their beliefs. What is different is which beliefs they are being warned against. The Ins and the Outs have changed places, but he door remains the same.

One of the drivers of the new public morality is who can fight back. British policemen do not go around telling Muslim imams not to preach against homosexuality because such preachers may take strenuous exception to their warnings. 

When I worked in the thickly PC world of AIDS services back in the 80's and early 90's, a group of gay men who had been involved in gay newspapers talked about learning the PC ropes. There was a woman they had met, her name was something like
Marly Wayan, who defined herself almost entirely by her oppressions: she was female, a dyke, and had some kind of disability. So the boyz decided that she would be the name for the Unit of Oppression. She herself had 3 Wayans. If you were a Jew, or an immigrant, or non-English-speaking, or poor, etc. you got another Wayan for each oppression.

Of course the point was that each Unit of Oppression, in the upside down world of PC, gave you...privilege. It was an inverted pyramid but it was rigidly pyramidal.
Whoever could claim the most Wayans in any given situation must be right.

The rules may change in content, but the game rarely does.