Attitudes, Schmattitudes (Reprise) 0

About a week ago, I blogged about the futility and fatuousness of self-styled “diversity training,” which, frankly, I view as a fraud and deception foisted on the training consumer.

The local rag (the one to which I don’t subscribe because I want a paper that takes more than 5 minutes to read) had a good follow-up story today.

This quote illustrates what happens when bad training is implemented by incompetent trainers:

Freshman Ryan Schneer, who is majoring in chemical engineering, believes the diversity program is an attempt to force students to adopt university-approved ideologies on debatable matters. And he doesn’t like the aftermath he has seen.

Schneer, who is Jewish, said he is concerned for a friend on another floor of his Russell Complex dormitory who is a devout Christian. Schneer said his friend wound up standing alone on the “No” side of the room when students in the Residence Life program were asked if they approved of gay marriage.

“Everyone else was on the other side,” Schneer said. “He’s a great guy, a nice person, but I ran into some girls at a party and they talked trash about him. I asked them, ‘Is he a bad person?’ But they’ve already made their decision. People who are different or outspoken are looked down upon. Things like this are tearing up the ideological diversity this nation was founded on.”

Lanan, a geology major, said people who objected to the program have been wrongly accused of intolerance.

A program which is supposed to foster tolerance, but, which, instead, creates it, deserves any bad publicity that it gets.

(Full disclosure: I believe the evidence resoundingly shows that sexual orientation is born, not made, and, because it is born, not made, cannot be changed.)

In case of the student described in this piece: If, whatever his personal beliefs and attitudes, he treats all persons in the same way, who the hell cares what he believes? His beliefs are his own.

Only his behaviors are the concern of his family, his friends, and the larger society–and only to the extent they affect his family, his friends, and the larger society.

(In other words, if he wants to show one face to his family and friends and another face to the larger society, that is, so long as no one is harmed, his privilege. Where does common courtesy end and hypocrisy begin? When there is harm. If there is no harm, the duplicity, if such there is, is between him and God, but society doesn’t have a stake in it.)