Civil Rights vs. Civility

Let us not confuse civil rights with civility.

Too often these similar-sounding concepts are conflated. This can lead to moral weakness and ineffectiveness in the arena of fighting for the former.

Consider: Waving to people wearing MAGA hats that wave at you first. Offering help to those in a broken down truck with a Confederate flag on it. Holding the door open for or giving the time of day to or bantering in the check-out line with the elderly lady using a walker who spouted racially tinged insults at staff moments before. These actions fall under civility, and there’s enormous pressure in our society to engage in such behaviors under almost all circumstances.

Ignore it.

You don’t owe civility to anyone who isn’t giving it to you. And by pronouncing with great theatricality that they support a flag of slavery, or a president of white nationalism, or a party of children in cages, they have long since abdicated any position of civility. Feel free to avoid and loathe such deplorables, either on the news or at the post office.

Plenty will see this as unnecessary crassness. They will challenge your upbringing, call you “evil,” or “UnAmerican.” Some will sermonize on nebulous platitudes like “being polite is the glue that holds society together,” or “politics shouldn’t divide us.”

They might also get into warped issues of “Free Speech,” if you publicly call for a boycott of a business, despite the fact the First Amendment applies only to the government.

Even those who are not in agreement with MAGA types may come to you place a hand on your shoulder and proceed to condescend you into oblivion with their greatest hits:

“ Healing and unity starts with civil dialogue. Just because you don’t agree with them…”

Or, “Hey, man, let’s just watch the game and not make this political.”

In short, assertive rudeness toward lousy people will shock and disgust, offend and enrage not only the target of your contempt, but some of those who claim to be allies.

Who cares?

By being concerned about cordiality with lovers of the destructive regime in the White House, we tacitly approve of same. In the very least we indicate that conversations about the weather, complete with nods and smiles, somehow contribute more to the cohesion of a free society than do justice and the rule of law. I’d rather a MAGA declare me guilty of being rude than be guilty of being a MAGA.

You see, what they, (and some nauseating centrists) don’t seem to acknowledge is that rudeness isn’t destructive of civil rights. MAGA people are still entitled to a lawyer if arrested, despite your snubbing them at the ice cream social. Not holding the door open behind you for the “Karen” in full-on MAGA regalia will not suspend the Constitution. Your neighbors aren’t getting hauled off to jail for hanging that rag in their own house because you mention to mutual acquaintances how defiled you would feel merely entering the place.

Turning your nose up at bigots is not an attack on their civil rights. And unlike many of those affected by true atrocities committed in the name of MAGA, they can and will get over it. (They are quick to point out they are no mere “snowflake,” after all.)

There is a building confrontation between the forces of right, and the armies (or unidentified federal agents?) of wrong, especially in the United States. It’s as potent as it is obvious. By making non-violence interchangeable with social deference, and a voluntary lack of courtesy synonymous with political oppression, the good guys hobble their cause right out of the gate.

We’re not talking about the ideal level for a minimum wage, or whether or not to endorse any given infrastructure legislation. This isn’t discourse over ideas of effective government. Lives, dignity, and freedoms are threatened openly by specific and easily identified groups today. Civility with them normalizes their actions and attitudes — a key baby step in their contamination of the republic.

You must fight as best you can every day for everyone’s civil rights, even those who would seek to throw transgendered people out of homeless shelters, or conjoin Jesus of Nazareth with hatred of immigrants. (As MAGAs do.) However, you owe such people exactly zero civility.

You may even owe it to the world to withhold a bit more of it from certain people these days.