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Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
from "The Ballad of East and West" by Rudyard Kipling Civil rights are just treating people with courtesy, dignity and respect. Civil rights is not judging people based on that fact that they belong to a certain ethnic, racial, religious, gender or sexual preference group. Why is this so hard? Why is there this knee jerk reaction to someone that we first meet that may have nothing to do with them? Culture, experience, what our parents thought. Lots of things. Civil rights is saying that even though we don't like them or approve of them, for whatever reason, they have the right to their own lifestyle and their own beliefs. . as long as they cause no harm to others. By no harm I mean physical harm, for the most part. We cannot put people in jail for calling other people names. We cannot put people in jail for not being nice enough. You can't make people like each other. You can stop people from hurting each other or lock them up if they do hurt someone. If someone is in a public place they have the right to walk where they want to walk and sit where they want to sit, as long as they are not breaking reasonable laws. If someone is known to cause harm and because of this they keep other people from being safe and without fear in a public place, they can be denied to right to be there, but this needs to be used with great care. One example is not allowing known gang members to keep law abiding people away from a public place. I am a member of the ACLU even though I don't approve of everything they do, but they do do enough good. They support pro-abortion rights, which I don't, but they also say that everyone has the right to speak out, including nazis, those scum of the earth. I have benefited from the feminist movement and I know they went through quite a bit of abuse and hatred so that I can do something besides housework, but I don't like the feminists telling me that while I no longer have to depend on a man to survive, I now have to depend on the government because I'm just not capable of making it on my own. Anytime a group forms to protect civil rights they do a lot of good, for a while, but then they usually go just a little (or a lot) too far. For instance, while there has been a lot of progress in fighting sexism, we have also lost a lot of fun because everyone's scared of being sexy and telling someone else they're sexy. I don't consider myself ugly but in 30 years of working I never considered myself to be sexually harassed but I have noticed in the last few years that no tells good dirty jokes anymore. I used to hear them mostly at work and, contrary to politically correct liturgy, I heard most of them from women. I miss that. I also miss dumb blonde jokes. I am grateful for people who fight for civil rights because they have helped us come a long way since women were the property of men and men were the property of nobles and nobles were the property of the king and the pope wasn't exactly full of peace and love toward any of them. The civil war was a great fight for civil rights even though everyone seemed to have a different idea of what that was. The revolutionary war was a great fight for civil rights even though many disagreed. What everyone always seems to forget is that all the fights for civil rights - the magna carta, reformation, the American revolution, the American civil war, even the world wars - were fights to keep the government from telling a group of people what they could not do, whether it was men without land could not vote, blacks could not vote, women could not vote, Jews could not live, atheists could not hold public office, gays could not love their lover, and on and on. We forget this and start expecting the government to tell others they cannot do what offends us. |