"Living consistently with your values" part 2

This post follows on from an earlier post a little more than four years ago.

Last week—I think it was last week—I was talking to Debbie over Zoom. She had just come in from roasting marshmallows with her family: daughter Mattie and her husband, plus their two boys (Debbie's grandsons). Roasting marshmallows? I said. That sounds like fun.

Oh it was, she added. And then she told me the story behind it.

The older boy is now in ... I'm not sure, but I think it's first grade. And at the beginning of the week, his teacher handed out a flyer about the Cub Scouts. Anyone who wanted to join could attend a meeting at a certain date and time, and they would roast marshmallows. 

Mattie and her husband told him No, they weren't going to sign him up for Scouts.The way Debbie described it, they gave two reasons:

1. The Boy Scouts require you to believe in God.
2. The Boy Scouts are homophobic.

Besides, said Mattie's husband, the main thing you do in Scouts is learn to go camping, and we already do a lot of camping.

But they were going to roast marshmallows!

So Mattie and her husband offered that the family could roast marshmallows on their own. And they did.

Just to get my own opinions out of the way in an aside, ... well, I mostly discussed them in the previous post, and they haven't really changed. To recap without the details, I'm all in favor of roasting marshmallows; but when my boys were in Scouting I found it kind of boring. (They liked Cub Scouts, but lost interest after the transition to Boy Scouts.) But boring or not, Scouts gave them a chance to get together with other kids their age to do fun things extracurricularly; so their enjoyment was a good enough reason for me to support them in it. As for the opinions of the adults, I doubt the kids ever paid enough attention to us to have any idea what our opinions were in the first place. Let me get back to my conversation with Debbie.  

I didn't feel like arguing with Debbie, because obviously it wasn't her decision. Also, arguing would make it sound like I have some kind of brief for Scouting, which I don't. But I did want to continue the conversation just a little. So I remarked that, when the boys were in Cub Scouts, they did have a "religious achievement" required but it was handled entirely at home. The requirement was to talk with your parents about what you believe at home, period. Other than that, I said I was sure that neither Den Leader had ever said a word about God in the hearing of the kids. Not that they had no opinions personally! I'd heard them express their opinions when talking to the other adults. But they kept their mouths closed around the kids.

In the same way, I told her I'd never heard a word from anyone that said anything about homosexuality, pro or con. It just wasn't a subject that came up.

Of course I softened all this by saying that I suppose it all depends on who the adult leaders are, and I could only describe my experience. And then we talked about something else. 

But I do find it kind of remarkable that Mattie and her husband take such a rigidly ideological approach to these questions ... and that it is so important to them to preserve their children's purity by not allowing them to associate with people who might think the wrong things. In a way it reminds me of the rigidity and intransigence that I've come to expect from Marie, when she insists that there are moral lines "you simply can't cross." There are voices I follow on Twitter who would argue that this kind of rigid, intransigent, ideological, and highly theoretical kind of morality—I mean, a morality that seems to revolve around checklists, and to have nothing to do with evaluating the human beings involved, in all their messy complexity—is just because they are all Liberals. These folks on Twitter just think all Liberals are like that. Open and shut. 

I don't want to believe it's that simple. And in fact I guess I don't believe it's that simple. I remember decades ago—back when I was an Objectivist for a couple of years—that I used a similar kind of calculus to measure people and events, even though I came out with different answers. 😀 So what did I (as I was back then) have in common with Marie today, or with Mattie and her husband (also today)?

I suppose I don't know Mattie and her husband well enough to answer for them. When comparing myself (in the past) with Marie (in the present), I think the common factor is inexperience. I thought the world was simple and could be described by a few quick equations because I had not yet had to live through situations that were messy, and that couldn't be so described. I'd probably even heard people say exactly that, but you don't believe it until you've been there. Another part of it is coming to recognize your own capacity for evil. You are slower to condemn others for minor things, when you realize that it means you, too.

That can't be the whole story. Even back then, I don't think I would have forbidden a child to join Scouts out of fear that someone in the group might believe in God. So there are still aspects that I don't understand. I wish I did.