What's your "core mandate?"

Mennonite Heritage Museum

“Both the job and my organization’s core mandate respect the individual human rights in Canada, including the values underlying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as other rights. These include reproductive rights and the right to be free from discrimination on the basis of sex, religion, race, national or ethnic origin, colour, mental or physical disability or sexual orientation, or gender identity or expression,” . . .. (Emphasis mine.)

The Canada Summer Jobs Application includes four “attestations,” the signing of which is required in order to qualify under the guidelines set out for organizations to receive taxpayer support in hiring students for the summer. The above is one of them. I’ve underlined the words that have offended pro-life groups particularly and parts of the population generally, thereby enabling news gatherers to milk yet another topic of marginal interest to the majority of people, most of whom will never see a Canada Summer Jobs Application.

First off, I manage the Mennonite Heritage Museum which hires a student through the government summer employment program. And, yes, I signed the attestation because our organization’s mandate and activities include nothing about reproductive rights and our student is not expected to promote any view whatsoever on the subject. In fact, if our student was using his/her contacts to hand out pro-life or pro-choice pamphlets, he/she could expect to be released. That would be no different from our student employee discriminating in his/her hosting of visitors on any of the other items in the third point of the attestation quoted above.

Most absurd in the protests is the complaint that the government is telling us with this attestation requirement what we should or should not believe. Nonsense. Signing the attestation binds me to nothing, compromises nothing regarding my personal faith; it simply requires that on matters of human rights and current Canadian law, I won’t count on taxpayers’ money to fund the propagation of my views. If I or my organization wish to take on a mandate that, for instance, includes the promotion of a pro-choice or pro-life “belief,” the option of paying a student out of our own funds is clearly there.

I think we’d all take exception to a religious organization’s using taxpayer funds to proselytize in the streets. Ruling this out is not a matter of belief or freedom; the issue is what public funds will or will not support. In Canada today, the freedom to express our faith and act on it is not infringed as it is in much of the world. This freedom needs protection and the false slant being put on this one issue is not helping.

The government can justifiably be criticized for singling out “reproductive rights” in a way that makes one wonder why this one and not other controversial beliefs and opinions are listed. But that’s probably a communication failure more than anything; the current federal government has stumbled over this brick before. Granted, the detailed policing of student employees and their activities is an impossibility given the resources assigned to this program so the attestations may be seen as a legitimate means toward requiring organizations to police themselves.

The Trudeau government has increased the number of student employment places considerably and my experience with the program has been more than positive. The Mennonite Heritage Museum has been able to provide a young man with invaluable experience and learning, probably with less public money than a classroom can offer. The provision of youth summer employment demands applause; protecting it from abuse is a laudable goal.

Trigger wasn't just a horse!

Frenchman River near Val Marie, Saskatchewan - Grasslands country

"Donald Trump (is/isn’t) a racist."

Grammatically speaking, racist in this sentence is a predicate adjective, an adjective placed in the predicating part of the sentence to modify (clarify, expand on) the sentence subject. It’s structure is the same as in the sentences, “Trigger is a horse,” or “King David was a bigamist.”

But most of us yawn at grammar niceties, so let’s simply say that using this sentence structure signals something that may not be intended, that may be harmful, and in a courtroom (with a judge who paid attention when he sat in English class in high school) might even be ruled to be slanderous or libelous. To say that someone is a racist, a bigamist, a procrastinator . . . or a horse, invites the inference that that adjective nails down the subject’s essential characteristic. It’s possibly justifiable in Trigger’s case, but nowhere else, really.

Because we’re all racists. We all attach prejudgments to people based on nationality, ethnicity, religion, age and sometimes race. It’s the kind of knee-jerk evaluation we make when we’re short of knowledge about people so that their appearance, their dress, their way of speaking leads to assumptions that may or may not have any merit. To do a racist thing, make a racist comment simply means that an assumption is being made based not on knowledge

 . . . but on a racial stereotype.

Adjectives modify (clarify, expand on) nouns, but when used to modify an action, we call them adverbs. Consider this: Donald Trump racistically decided to call African countries “s**tholes.” The racism attaches to the action, naming the quality of an incident or decision, not the person. And we all know that labels applied to people can be exceedingly harmful in general, life-destroying in some cases.

There are people who occasionally make racist remarks, occasionally engage in racist acts. I’m in that group, I think. There are also people who make a habit of applying racially based stereotypes, people like those KKK and white supremacist group members who literally believe that merit can be accurately deduced from skin colour, for instance. To label an individual KKK member as a racist, though, implies that this prejudice in him is his essential characteristic, and that would simply repeat his error.

People are never justly summed up in one word. Even Trigger is unjustly labeled as “simply a horse.” Ask Roy Rogers if you doubt this.

Dropping a racist remark doesn’t make me “just a racist.” It means that I haven’t finished my education yet and should probably wash my mouth out with soap, sit in the corner for a few hours with a grammar text and an encyclopedia.

And for those of us who believe we ought to do our bit to make the world better, we could begin by weighing our own words more carefully, by calling out racially-motivated actions in government, in business, in the social structures of our time. We need to learn and practice the difference between the adverbial and the adjectival use of our labels, for a start!

In the end, nothing worthwhile is accomplished by arriving at a consensus that Trump is or is not a racist, although people seem right now to be obsessed with this quest. His pseudo-presidency has included any number of acts that should long since have disqualified him as a leader, some to which an apparent racist motivation could certainly be applied. Would be nice if more of what the man does and says could be motivated by humility, by empathy, by courtesy.

One can always hope that sometime a light, an epiphany will break through. One can only hope.

Bridling unruly horses

OH, Earth!!

So let’s get it straight before we succumb to the “free speech” mantra that’s pervading Trump’s America and social media like a virus. 

The meaning of “freedom” ought to evolve in us as we mature. To 10-year old Bobby, the concept of equivalency is still mixed up with notions of freedom and justice: if 16-year old Mike can stay up ‘til 10, then he should be allowed to stay up ‘til 10 too! To grow into adulthood without mastering ethical nuance . . . and then shouting out invective as a right based on equivalency, well, it's inexcusable. 

I recently chided someone on Facebook for re-posting a photo of a sign displayed by a service station owner in Spruce Grove, Alberta. On the large, lighted, elevated marquee, the owner had placed the words, “F**k NDP/Trudeau.” Along with the original post came a long list of crude, supporting replies—middle-finger trolls focused on “liberals” indiscriminately and defending the station owner's sign as a demonstration of free speech.

Equivalency. If you’re allowed to say publicly that you disagree with my viewpoint, then I’m allowed to put up a sign with your name that says, “Go f**k yourself!” And if I’m allowed to say it, what’s the difference among saying it to myself, to you, to coffee-row friends or to the whole world on a marquee?

Freedom to dress as one pleases in Canada doesn’t mean that it’s OK to prance through the mall naked. Freedom to own a gun doesn’t mean it’s OK to use it to settle arguments. The entire purpose of civil law is the prevention or redress of harm and/or unwarranted offense to persons; an adult who can’t yet see the difference among constructive, neutral and harm-producing speech is missing a key component of moral development, namely the ability to differentiate, that big step beyond the equivalency sensibility of childhood.

I know from personal experience that political leanings—the conservative/liberal spectrum and where our worldview lies on it—produces enormous temptation to commit verbal harm, to undermine, to denigrate, to hurl speech rocks at “the other side.” I admit that I have often rejoiced in the pain of those who are on the other side. I’ve also felt the tooth-grinding chagrin of loss when accompanied by jubilation in the camp of the competition.

Surviving those feelings without resorting to ad hominem barb-throwing is a struggle. Granted.¹

But we’ve got to try. We need to call out in no uncertain terms those who can’t or won’t differentiate, who are becoming more and more addicted to the speech bomb. (It doesn’t help that the American president seems to be a master of destructive speech.) We’ve got to force ourselves to debate ideas and policies without reverting to ad hominem attack. We’ve got to revisit the gospel admonition that we’re called to love people, even those whom we consider enemies.

And the central component of loving is behavioral.

 

Bridling the tongue is like bridling an unruly horse; not easy . . . but necessary.

1: appealing to feelings or prejudices rather than intellect. An ad hominem argument: marked by or being an attack on an opponent's character rather than by an answer to the contentions made. (Merriam-Webster)