"Bigotry tries to keep truth safe in its hand with a grip that kills it."

                                                                                                  -Rabindranath Tagore

  

 

The thing about bigots is that they usually don't believe that they are bigots. Often someone whose opinions are based on either fear or a lack of understanding will invent a rationale for their bigotry so they can explain exactly why they are not bigots. Those who are intolerant of things that may fall out of their narrow-minded comfort zones have a special conviction. Bigots feel that they are among the privileged few who have a special handle on the truth.

 

Sanctimonious jerks.

 

Thankfully we live in a society that denounces such abhorrent, small-minded behavior in its citizenry. People's right to exist in freedom and safety regardless of their race, religion or sexual orientation is protected by law, and perhaps more importantly, it is enforced by civility. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is what the United States of America is all about. Unfortunately some of the darker aspects of human nature make it so that for many the need to be self-righteous is a more powerful urge than the contemporary social climate. Many need to express anger over their unfortunate lives and their personal misgivings by placing blame elsewhere. This is the essence of unwarranted ego-driven dogmatism. Piousness.  Indignation. Vengeance.  Bigotry has had to re-invent itself so that the angry and small-minded have a viable outlet to exercise their hate.

 

Meet the new boss...same as the old boss.

 

The acrimonious doctrinaire for the 21^st century is one who would ignorantly apply a morality with sexuality and impose a set of ethics that they feel should be unilaterally applied to everyone. Not only must other's believe in God in a fashion that suits their astigmatic presumptions, but they must also practice conjugation in a manner consistent to what they believe the Almighty's will to be. Marital monogamy as not just a standard, but also a moral obligation; Sexual bigotry is the new frontier.

 

Fideists who would impose their sexual ideology on other consenting adults, and infer what they can and cannot do in the privacy their own bedrooms have become all too common. The nuclear American Family has had a set of "values" forced upon them that has an abysmal rate of failure.  Religion, the self-help industry and Walt Disney have conspired (unwittingly) to condition many to believe that there is only one way to thrive in a marriage. Yet despite the evidence to the contrary, this outdated standard endures. Many Americans, who have become angry over their inability to maintain an emotional connection with their spouse, let alone acknowledge their own failures at intimacy, have been trained to ignore what's in front of them and focus their negative energies on those who practice a different marital standard than they do. Any person who seeks sexual expression is to be labeled as immoral... Indecent.   The businesses of religion and self help rely on this. However despite the rhetoric of these institutions, and the monogamy myth they need to perpetuate, there are literally hundreds of thousands of happily married couples who successfully employ negotiated non-monogamy in their relationships.

 

Implying that couples who exercise sexual proclivity are at all immoral simply because they practice intimacy in a way that might force people to re-examine their own hypocrisy makes it easier for bigots to justify their misdirected wrath.  But attaching a moral implication to how someone conducts themselves sexually with other consenting adults is at best questionable. Conventional wisdom would have us believe that a person's morality is directly impacted by their private sexual practices, when in actuality not only is there no correlation, you could easily make a case that the most morally questionable acts done throughout history have all been done by those who would oppress freedom of sexual expression. Questioning the morality of a swinger is just as bigoted as if someone were attempt to apply a set of ethics to any other group of people whose private lives have no impact on their accusers. Yet this form of bigotry is not only tolerated, it is encouraged.   

 

It is interesting to note that there is often a different moral standard applied to couples who DO NOT practice negotiated non-monogamy, yet stray outside of their relationship both physically and emotionally. It would seem that marital indiscretion is more tolerated provided that one makes an attempt at a pretense of monogamy. Couples who mediate their extra marital copulation rarely experience the same level of altruism, rather they must often suffer the inequity of those who perceive themselves as being the bearers of a moral standard that is actually the result of years of conditioning. The clichéd responses have been programmed into the Middle-American marital mindset, and the result is the crumbling foundation of contemporary marriage.

 

 The nature of a bigot is that they project their own insecurity at others, and even in this form, it is no different. Bigotry by any other name is still simply just a self-serving myopic opinion, and when it comes right down to it; projection is the psychological term for being an asshole. There are no committed couples who engage in extra marital fornication that insist that their recipe' for a happy marriage should be standard that others must live by. No swinger has ever been quoted as saying that people who chose physical monogamy are in any way shape or form wrong for doing so. It's amusing then, that those waving the banner of righteousness are the very one's who continually exhibit a lack of tolerance or understanding, and it they who will oppress the rights of others who would otherwise have no impact on their lives.

 

Perhaps someone needs to explain to me exactly how it has become acceptable to allow bigotry to be disguised as morality.