Protective Parents or Flaming Hypocrites?

 I’ve written in this space before about ordinary people generating risqué content for online distribution, and questioned if anybody other than the people involved and their families (and, presumably, their customers) have any real right to complain about it. Granted that somebody who us posting adult content on social media while also broadcasting who they work for probably shouldn’t, complaining about content that you had to track down and then pay to access is reminiscent of the joke from the last century about somebody being offended by nudist neighbors they had to use a telescope to see at all – that is, it’s stupid. But if anyone out there is surprised about private school faculty and/or religious organizations going berserk over such a situation, I’ve got to ask if you are at all familiar with American culture…

You can pick up the story from the People magazine Human Interest page, or from the local television station’s story about it, but the case seems to be spreading all over the Internet. It seems that the local Catholic diocese has decided to expel three students from their school in Sacramento, California, because parents of some of the other kids found out that their mom posts “adult” pictures of herself on a subscription site called “OnlyFans.com.” Up until the scandal broke, the mom in question was an unremarkable member of the community, who actually served as a volunteer teacher’s assistant or “Room Mom” for one of the second grade classes as the school. Now, however, she and her children appear to have been blackballed from all Church facilities in the diocese…

It seems worth noting that the woman at the center of this case insists that none of her pictures are actually pornographic, and that this is not being disputed by the school, the Church, or even the other parents raising an (anonymous) ruckus over the matter. I should also point out that “OnlyFans.com” is a subscription site that does check the ages of subscribers, and that the mom in our story doesn’t advertise her work; you’d have to know who she was, deliberately go looking for her, and then pay to get access to her pictures before could see them. I could also point out that by the time any child is old enough to have any interest in risqué pictures of any kind there is no power on Earth that will prevent them from finding some, even if they aren’t pictures of a classmates’ mother…

Now, I’m not about to suggest that any organization should be required to utilize volunteers or employees regardless of who those people are or what else they do. Certainly, there are people I wouldn’t want directly interacting with a room full of seven-year-old school children. Moreover, a religious school is, by definition, a private organization, and is therefore not subject to Equal Opportunity Employment laws or First Amendment protections. But throwing three children out of your school because you don’t approve of something their mother does on her own time to make extra money and/or improve marital relations does seem a bit harsh. It’s hard to imagine what harm the kids themselves could possibly be doing to anyone – and if any parents are allowing their seven-year-old children to access adult sites on the Internet, with or without adult supervision, they probably deserve whatever happens as a consequence…

The other question that strikes me is, how did the parents who sent in the packet of pictures to the school authorities get them in the first place? It’s possible that somebody’s kid got access to their credit card or hacked the site’s firewall, but given the vast amounts of pornography available for free online it seems unlikely that anyone would bother. Absent any evidence to the contrary – and the school hasn’t even claimed to have any – I think we have to assume that someone in the community got wind of the mom in our story posting adult pictures of herself, and then spent hours or days combing through the seamier side of the Internet until they found the pictures. At which point my first question isn’t even “Why do you care?” so much as it is “If you are so against this type of material, why are you surfing adult websites in the first place?”

Think about that one really carefully before you answer…

Too Complicated For Me

If you were to ask anyone who studies human behavior – which is all Management scholars really do, when you get down to cases – they will tell you that human motivations are one of the hardest things to definitively identify. You can ask people why they did something, and it is possible that you might an honest answer, but once you start allowing for confirmation bias, self-deception, rationalization, different interpretations of behavioral and cultural standards, and sheer pigheaded stubbornness, just to name a few, it’s not always clear if the people in question even know why they did things. The question of whether humans are rational or rationalizing goes back at least three centuries, and probably for as long as people have been people, and that doesn’t even consider ignorance, bigotry, or outright stupidity…

Take, for example, the actions of a non-profit group calling itself The American Bible Society (hereinafter ABS). The organization has been in operation since 1816, fulfilling the mission of translating the Bible into various languages and distributing copies around the world, so that people who don’t speak English, Latin, or Aramaic can read the Christian scripture for themselves. The ABS has had a core values statement stressing generally laudable principles like integrity which it has asked employees to sign for some years, but the statement wasn’t specifically Christian and failing to sign it wasn’t a termination offense. All of that appears to have changed this year, however…

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer’s website, the ABS has a new policy that they call the “Affirmation of Biblical Community” that, among other things, forbids pre-marital and extra-marital sex, and defines marriage as being limited to one man and one woman. The organization is requiring all of its personnel to sign the new policy statement, and presumably abide by its provisions, or resign from the ABS by the end of calendar 2018. This would effectively prohibit anyone who lives with a partner to whom they are not married, and anyone in a same-sex marriage, from working for the ABS. Whether it would also cause any such people to become alienated from the organization, consider its leadership to be a bunch of small-minded homophobic bigots, or prevent the ABS from operating as effectively is yet to be determined, but according to the Inquirer a number of core personnel have already resigned their posts…

Whether or not this will bring the ABS into conflict with any Federal or state anti-discrimination laws remains to be seen, although it is worth noting that Philadelphia itself has a law that forbids discrimination on the basis of race, religion, or sexual orientation. There are exceptions in the law for non-profits and religious groups, and the ABS might be able to argue in court that they need such a requirement for reasons that escape me at the moment. What I find even more bizarre and inexplicable is what the leadership of the group thinks that such a prohibition – and the resulting alienation, distain, and anger – will do to improve their operations or help them to accomplish their mission…

The president and CEO of the group is quoted in the Inquirer story as saying that this new policy will bring “unity and clarity” to the ABS because it will ensure that their staff has a “deep and personal connection to the Bible.” I’m not sure why they believe that such a connection is necessary in order to translate text into different languages or handle the logistics of getting hard copies of the documents to people around the world who (presumably) want to read them; I’m also not clear on why they think traits like intolerance and bigotry are appropriate to a (supposedly) Christian religious mission. But even if there is any merit in those positions, I still believe that the ABS leadership has their priorities backwards…

As I have noted in posts about for-profit companies with mandatory religious requirements, it might be pleasant for the ABS personnel to work surrounded by other Christian zealots; it might also prevent anyone who works there from questioning the bigotry and intolerance being perpetuated by their leadership. But the purpose of this agency isn’t to reinforce the beliefs of existing Christian zealots or contribute to their upkeep; it is to bring the scripture as they see it to people who do not currently have access to the texts and may not even be Christians at this time. I have to ask, once again, if it wouldn’t make more sense to do good works for people and tell anyone who asks that “I do these things for you because my faith demands it” than to imply than anyone who isn’t an intolerant religious bigot is unwelcome in your ministry?

I’ve spent most of my life watching people, and most of the last three decades studying them, but I still find this sort of behavior baffling in anyone, let alone adherents of a faith that teaches acceptance, love, and universal equality as children of the same creator. Maybe this contradiction makes sense to someone, somewhere, but despite my best efforts it’s still too complicated for me…