Roxanne Tellier – Confronting the Higher Moral Ground

I’m taking a stand – against those who claim ethically superior principles based solely on their religious beliefs.  I’m sick of the mealy mouthed and the self-righteous who feel free to condemn everyone around them for not toeing some invisible moral line. Enough with placating the unplacatable; no one alive completely exemplifies what it is to be good in the eyes of all. Only the dead attain that status, and even then, usually only through memories conveniently fortified with whitewash, amnesia, and mawkish sentimentality.

An honour guard carries the casket of former Toronto mayor Rob Ford into city hall, where he will lie in repose, on Monday, March 28, 2016. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young

Social media and the ever slavering commercial media have been enjoying an all-you-can-eat outrage buffet this year, dining royally on the shock and awe of people actually daring to express and live their vaunted ‘freedoms.’ The last time I checked, neither Canada nor the U.S. were run by Sharia law, but there are days when you’d be hard-pressed to define what does make North America tick, from the hysteria of the religious and sanctimonious morality squad.

Time and again the most publicly virtuous are exposed as privately lascivious, to our delight. What’s more fun than pointing out the hypocrisy of others, while we clutch our pearls in pretended disgust, and tsk tsk in clucking disapproval?

“Something tells me it’s all happening at the zoo. I do believe it, I do believe it’s true…”

We’re apparently still talking about the transgender bathroom controversy (and by controversy, I mean it’s been proven unconstitutional and condemned by the country, but a small group of people are still clinging to their mistaken and unproven belief that anyone with a different sexuality is evil and must be burned at the stake.)

The main proponents are self-styled experts with outsized holier-than-thou platforms, who have clearly neither understood nor even looked up the definition of transgender, which is; “denoting or relating to a person whose self-identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of male or female gender.”

Rather, these morons prefer to double down on their ignorance,  terrified and terrorized by the bad cross-dressers who live in the imaginary closets of their minds, not even realizing that for transvestites, it’s the dressing up that’s the fetish –  sorry, bud, you they don’t find attractive at all.

This very human propensity for characterizing and demonizing others isn’t new, but social media has added new fuel to the fire, since we can now share our disapproval lickety-split quick, and globally, to other people who haven’t time to ‘look into’ the individual offense, but will gladly scan the headline, kneejerk an opinion, add their own stamp of disapproval, and send it out to all those who have the misfortune of knowing them. Ah, brave new world!

It makes me tired. Countering resentment, bitterness, self-righteousness, and the envy of those who would act in the same way, given the same scenario and ability, if they could get away with it, is wearing me out. We publicly condemn the exposed, corrupt, billionaires, crying, “hang ‘em high!” while privately thinking that conning the poor and misfortunate was a pretty clever business plan – until they got caught.

We have become the equivalent of the crawl at the bottom of the TV screen, constantly commentating on what we shouldawouldacoulda done, had that bad thing happened to us.

These analysts cling to their opinions like their thoughts are official flotation devices, when in reality,they’re out of their depths in the shallowest of wading pools.

The only way to rationalize our instincts to do what feels good and makes us happy, despite societal restrictions, is to frame our requests in ways that dance around Bible Belt mentality. Legalize cannabis, because it has health benefits, we say. How can you deny the cries of the ill and injured?  Only a monster would withhold medication from those in need! Meanwhile, we downplay that pot can sometimes just be fun to ingest. Because fun … no nono! Give me a reason why you need pot, you filthy drug addict! Force me to reluctantly concede to make legal an herb that has been unfairly and falsely maligned for a century! (And then, once it’s as legal as alcohol and tobacco, we’ll all get together and indulge ourselves to our hearts content … no hard feelings, eh?)

No, this kind of soft policing by gossip, innuendo,and lack of evidence has got to stop. We have access to more information via our cell phones than any other civilization in history has ever had, and yet so many are backpedalling at top speed into wilful ignorance and pretended stunned condemnation of other people’s actions.

On the one hand, we recognize that a shocking number of North American women – 1 in 4 –are sexually assaulted in their lifetimes, but when a beloved media icon is accused of assault, our immediate response is to reject the allegation, and find culpability in the actions of the victim, all the while spreading the word in hushed, salacious, tones.  For some twisted reason, we find it difficult to separate the creation and creators of art from the actions of abusers, even though history has shown us that celebrity does not guarantee innocence.

Here – I’ll prove it to you. These men have all been accused of, and either admitted publicly or in a court of law, that they were guilty of abuse. I’ll bet at least one of these names will jump out at you, and propel you into a fit of injured defence: Bill Cosby, Woody Allen, Sean Penn, Eminem, Chris Brown, Mike Tyson, Anthony Kiedis, Tupac Shakur, R Kelly, Jimmy Page, Michael Fassbender, Roman Polanski, Sean Connery, Tommy Lee, Johnny Depp, Mystikal,  PeeWee Herman, Jeffrey Jones, David O. Russell,  Jared Fogle, Jerry Sandusky, Charles Dickens,  J.D. Salinger, Pablo Picasso.

And that’s before we even get to the more onerous, highly contemptible, disgraced politicians, like Dennis Hastert, former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, who pleaded guilty to illegally structuring bank transactions  of $3.5 million to quash allegations of decades of sexual misconduct with students. Or the complete and utter hypocrisy of Bristol Palin, daughter of Sarah Palin, the Alaskan Bible Spice, popping out two illegitimate children while pocketing $1 million for promoting abstinence to American high school students.

That old reprobate, Newt Gingrich, illustrated beautifully the convoluted logic of these right wing politicians, caught in a web of discovered ethical misconduct, which nimbly deflects personal criticisms of wrong doing by taking a moral swipe at the dreaded liberal bogeyman

“If we look at history from the mid-1960s, we’ve gone from a request for toleration to an imposition of intolerance. We’ve gone from a request to understand others to a determination to close down those who hold traditional values. I think that we need to be very aggressive and very direct. The degree to which the left is prepared to impose intolerance and to drive out of existence traditional religion is a mortal threat to our civilization and deserves to be taken head-on and described as what it is, which is the use of government to repress the American people against their own values.”

Separation of church and state be damned! Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, or the flag he’s wrapped around himself.

Don’t even get me started on how many children’s’ lives have been ruined by the actions of those in religious authority. The insistence of those who claim to uphold ‘family values,’ while simultaneously playing the  divine, ‘get out of jail free card’ to excuse their own depravities, past and present, is beneath contempt.

Point being, there’s not just one or two bad actors out there, assaulting the defenseless – there’s an army of abusers who take whatever modicum of fame and power –  no matter how insignificant the power – they possess, and misuse their authority.  We have to acknowledge that sex is only serendipitously the reason that there are 7 billion people on the planet –  sexuality is a driving force  that ensures the continuation of human life. But it’s also the dynamic that compels some warped individuals to take violent sexual gratification from anyone or anything in their path. Rather than receiving the message that sex can be fun and fulfilling for the parties involved, as well as essential to procreation, they’ve had their own sexuality condemned as immoral and beyond control, leading those poor souls  to act out in ways that are truly immoral.

But we cannot address the sickness without addressing the root causes. The insanity of enforcing puritanical principles in a twenty-first century technology based world has to be laid bare, even at the cost of some offended sensibilities.

Is it too much to ask that humans, living in an unprecedented time of accessible information,  education and enlightenment, live up to their potentials? The modern world, so contemptuous of the presumed backwardness of Third World nations, needs to tell the mealy mouthed, fundamentalist critics to back off. There’s no moving forward for humanity as long as society has to pander to anti-intellectualism, hostility to science, formless fears, grievances, and the perpetually self-victimized walking wounded in the chronically under informed brigade.

=RT=

Roxanne’s column appears here every Sunday 

Contact us at dbawis@rogers.com

Roxanne Tellier has been singing since she was 10 months old … no, really. Not like she’s telling anyone else how to live their lives, because she’s not judgmental, and most 10 month olds need a little more time to figure out how to hold a microphone. She has also been a vocalist with many acts, including Tangents, Lady, Performer, Mambo Jimi, and Delta Tango. In 2013 she co-hosted Bob Segarini’s podcast, The Bobcast, and, along with Bobert, will continue to seek out and destroy the people who cancelled ‘Bunheads’.