Judgment and Societal Norms

I've been very delinquent posting here recently.  I've been running around with sporadic internet access lately and that's part of it.  The other part is that a lot of the interesting stuff in my life is not necessarily public appropriate.  I also think it's probably pretty boring to read about the stuff that is public appropriate.  At any rate, I digress.

I'm back in MD after an extended period away.  I've been catching up on conversations with a lot of friends.  It might not surprise you to know that many of my friends live "alternative" lifestyles, considering I myself live an alternative lifestyle in some ways (though I tend to think of myself as pretty normal).  For whatever reason, several of these recent conversations have centered on societal norms.  I've been doing a lot of thinking about the subject.

Why the hell are so many of these norms still "normal" in this day and age?  I'm not talking about societal norms that exist for obvious reasons.  I mean, it seems pretty clear why murder is inappropriate in any society that expects to function.  That is clearly a rational norm.  But what about other things?

In one conversation, the topic that jump-started confusion over norms was marriage.  Two of my friends who have an unconventional relationship recently got married.  The decision to legally formalize their relationship had more to do with legal practicalities than anything else; they are not the kind of people who need to follow the expected conventional path in terms of marriage.  Nor did they have a traditional wedding, reception, etc.  For some reason, this seems to bother many people they know.  Why?  Why would this have any bearing on other people?  It doesn't.  And yet other people seem to feel the need to interject judgment on them for not doing it the "right" way.  This behavior eludes me.  Why does it matter if someone does all the traditional stuff?  How two people choose to live their life together is really only relevant to the two people involved.  So what if YOU want a traditional wedding...are you so unwilling to accept that not everyone might want the same things you do?

In another conversation, I was discussing the fact that I am not a traditional romantic.  Don't get me wrong, I love romance, but what most people think of as "romance" is not me.  I don't need a big engagement ring or elaborate proposal.  As a matter of fact, I'd rather have the proposal be private than some big public declaration of the intent to marry.  And as for the ring, it seems like there are better things to spend money on than a piece of bling.  I don't need material gifts.  I'd much rather celebrate special ocassions by, you know, actually spending time with the people I love.  Spending time is more important to me than material goods.  And yet so many people seem to think it means you don't love them if you don't buy someone roses on Valentine's day (I'd rather have you buy me Gerber daisies on a random day when you know I'm in a bad mood).  Why do people judge other couples as "not in love" if they don't all engage in the accepted relationship practices?  I have yet to figure this out.  How the heck do you know what two people feel for each other or what is meaningful to them?  Is it so hard to understand that people might be different?

I was very much raised to think that adults should be able to do their own thing.  People celebrate life, death, happiness, and sadness in different ways.  People grieve differently.  Why should I force my understanding of any of these concepts on you?  I'm so happy my family looks at life with this attitude.  You don't want to come to so and so's funeral because you want to grieve alone?  Great.  No one is going to judge you.  Let us know if you need anything.  No one that I care about is going to get snippy because I chose not to have a garter toss at my wedding, but hey, if you want to do that at your wedding, I'm not going to look down on you.  Do your own thing.  Do what is important to you.

There are so many important things in the world.  Life and death things.  Perhaps the world would be a better place if people focused more on the important things and less on the bullshit.  Perhaps people should focus more on what is important to those who they care about than what society thinks those people should or should not be doing.

This is one of those things that I don't think I'm ever going to get.  There seem to be a lot of those things, and most of them have to do with social traditions and norms that do not seem to be based on any kind of rationality.

Juno, Waitress, and Religion and Politics

Went to see Juno last night at AFI.  Definitely a good movie - funny, but also touching, and Ellen Page does a really good job.  I'm sure she'll be in some other movies soon.  Also, I love Allison Janney and she was hilarious in this movie.  I highly recommend going to see it if you haven't already.  Oh - it also had a fabulous soundtrack with Belle and Sebastian on it.

After the movie we went to McGinty's and had a few beers.  We started talking about politics since CNN was on covering the Super Tuesday returns.  I told Keenan that I thought a McCain/Huckabee ticket was all but unstoppable...and that HRC probably has the best chance against them, but it would still be an uphill battle.  Somehow after that we all started talking about religion and our personal views on it...even Billy got in on the conversation after being largely quiet.  It's been a long time since I've had a real talk about religion with people and it was nice.

When I got home it was still pretty early - around midnight, so I decided to pop in one of the dvds I currently have from Netflix: Waitress.  This movie got really good reviews and I was looking forward to it, but in the end I didn't think it was that good of a movie.  Basically, Keri Russell plays a waitress who makes pies who is in an unhappy marriage and gets pregnant.  She starts having an affair with her doctor, and she has all kinds of inane conversations with the other waitresses at work.  Anyways, I thought it was overrated.  I wonder if I would have liked it more if I hadn't seen it immediately after Juno.  Whereas Juno was a movie that was about strong and empowered women, Waitress seemed to me to have a lot of codependent female characters...even the ending which I think is supposed to be the strong female ending did not seem to be that way to me. 

One of the best blog posts I've read in awhile

Read this! (from Overcoming Bias)

I'm tagging this with a poker tag because eventhough it's not explicitly about poker, it is about decision theory which is always applicable to poker.  Political science tag because decision theory is also blatantly related to polisci (especially in the rational choice literature...regardless of your opinion of RCT, in polisci we are concerned with understanding and predicting how people behave politically speaking, so obviously decision theory is relevant).  Religion tag because I love his characterization of his path to atheism.  It mimics my own (side bar: Maybe people interested in promoting religion should stop giving such vapid answers to children who obviously are deep thinkers and in asking "why" want a real answer, not one that betrays a lack of understanding of the topic at hand). 

Marriage: Religious and/or Civil?

It has become very clear to me that there is a big problem that is manifesting itself in all different ways: marriage is increasingly a civil proposition in addition to a religious one.  And guess what, this post is not even inspired by gay marriage.

As probably anyone who reads this knows, Jeff and I were married civilly, not religiously.  In other words, our marriage is not sanctioned by any religious authority, only by the state of Florida (and fortunately for us, since we are straight, the other 49 states too). 

When gay marriage first started becoming a hot topic, I immediately thought of Jeff and myself (though obviously we are not gay).  What about our marriage?  If the word marriage is only supposed to be used for religious unions, do Jeff and I have a civil union instead of a marriage?  Are we not supposed to refer to ourselves as married but rather civily united?  Is it OK because we are a man and a woman?  And if it is OK because we are a man and a woman, how does this not amount to government discrimination against homosexuals?

I came to believe that either the state would have to start calling all civil marriages civil unions and permit gay civil unions in addition to heterosexual civil unions, or that the state would have to get out of the business of "unionizing" people all together.  Leave it to the religions and allow people in domestic relationships regardless of their religious marriage status to have partnership benefits.  Obviously (or at least it seems obvious to me), it makes more sense to go with option number one, or some variant thereof rather than having the state get out of the marriage business.

Anyways, this is one big digression from what actually prompted me to make this post.  This legislation being considered by the Maryland General Assembly came to my attention today.  Yet another instance of a problem caused by the state and religions trying to do two different versions of the same thing.

Funniest quote in the article:

"While the bill may "intersect with religion," he said, it "would not excessively entangle" the two."

Honey, the two are already hopelessly, excessively entangled.

Runner up quote-wise:

""We hope it will be seen as a religious freedom issue," he said, because it makes it possible for women to "marry and remain in [their] faith."

Without such a bill, "women have to make a choice if they wish to remain" practicing Orthodox Jews."

Ummmmmm....  Does anyone else see the problem with this?  Obviously if the above are true, then it is the state legislating what religions can and cannot do, which I have a huge problem with. 

It seems like there are more and more instances of church/state issues related to marriage.  I wonder when eventually things are going to tip one way or the other.

Atheists: most distrusted minority

The University of Minnesota recently completed a study that identified atheists as America's most distrusted minority. 

From the press release:

"Even though atheists are few in number, not formally organized and relatively hard to publicly identify, they are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public. “Atheists, who account for about 3 percent of the U.S. population, offer a glaring exception to the rule of increasing social tolerance over the last 30 years,” says Penny Edgell, associate sociology professor and the study’s lead researcher.

Edgell also argues that today’s atheists play the role that Catholics, Jews and communists have played in the past—they offer a symbolic moral boundary to membership in American society. “It seems most Americans believe that diversity is fine, as long as every one shares a common ‘core’ of values that make them trustworthy—and in America, that ‘core’ has historically been religious,” says Edgell. Many of the study’s respondents associated atheism with an array of moral indiscretions ranging from criminal behavior to rampant materialism and cultural elitism."

Pretty interesting...  I am always interested in this kind of stuff, and the difference between groups that are visible (African Americans, for example) and groups that are "invisible" (do you know the religious preferences of everyone you interact with?)

Click here to read the full press release.