Tradition and True Belief

This morning I was in downtown Guimaraes, not far from the castle, when church got out. The people came swarming out onto the streets -- old people, mothers with their children, men in black suits, talkative teenagers. They lined up inside the pastelerias, and the men gathered in clumps in the main plaza to talk. Traffic came to a stop as the pedestrians filled the cobblestone streets, with bells ringing wildly in every direction. The random mixture brought people together by surprise, old friends running into one another, and they would stop on the sidewalk to talk or walk together slowly, catching up, comparing notes. In a few minutes the streets were quiet again.

This week I am in the Minho region of Portugal, a region where the church has deep roots. Religion affects everything that happens here, how people dress, how they behave toward their neighbors. Tradition is not something that is discussed and explained and debated, it is simply the fabric upon which these lives are woven. You could have come to Guimaraes (pronounced "geema-rEYEsh," where the "EYE" is pronounced like the English word "eye") a thousand years ago and seen these same people gathering in this same plaza, eating these same pastries, refreshed after a Sunday morning reunion with God. The teenagers would have not been quite so pierced, and there wouldn't have been mobile-phone ads in the windows, but otherwise, the spirit of this community is constant.

As I walked through the crowds, I wouldn't help comparing this religious life with the "deep religious faith" of bigoted people in my home county. In both cases religion is a force that affects how people behave. I'm sure Catholic guilt has kept many a wild-child in line here in the hilly countryside; I know I myself have had the little old ladies in black turn and give me a withering look for deviating from their expectation. Social pressure defines and enforces norms, and the church plays a role in that, here as well as there, recommending temperance and encouraging parishioners to stay on the straight and narrow path of righteousness.

Part of the reason it works here is that everyone participates, everyone here is Catholic, the society is quite homogeneous. The little old ladies can give you "the look" on the street because they assume you are one of them, stepping outside their norms -- they do not suspect you are a foreigner who just doesn't know the local customs.

Part of the reason it doesn't work in America is just the complement of that: we are a culture based on diversity. Each subgroup might have its own norms, the Italians can have theirs and the Nigerians theirs, the Jews and the Poles and the Punjabis each with their way of talking, their expectations about how their people will behave and who they will marry, where they will work and live. And it is even okay for members of one group to look down on members of another, it's not something to encourage, but it is not unthinkable that an ethnic group would think itself superior. Well, actually, they just about all do. Whatever, keep it at home, it is not a topic for public discourse whether Group A is superior to Group B, in America that kind of talk is vulgar.

We do not accept one group, whether it's an ethnic group, a religious group, a fraternity or gang, defining the personal norms for people in another group. And in fact, in America, if your own group has standards you don't agree with, you are free to light out and hang with whoever. That's hard to do, but it happens every day.

The CRC is behaving as if they were those little old ladies in black with the withering glances, as if they had some authority over a person who decides to live in a way they don't understand or approve of. They want to give "the look" to gay people, to transgender people, and ... make them stop. But one, they don't have the right to do that, and two, it won't work. It doesn't work here in the shining valleys of the Minho, and it won't work there in the Chesapeake watershed.

It's interesting to turn it around, it's interesting of them to paint the new nondiscrimination bill as an attack on them. They will be forced to tolerate something they can't understand, and so the problem is that that's an imposition on them to change. I'm sorry, but when some innocent person's life if pure hell because of the way ignorant people treat them, it's not the innocent person's fault. Societies do impose norms on their members, and in America the norm is tolerance. We're all different, and we respect those differences, whether we understand them or not. If you can't handle that, move somewhere where everybody's the same.