Double standards of society

During his wanderings along the dusty roads of Palestine, Christ once came upon a blind beggar, Bartimaeus, sitting at the side of the road. The man repeatedly called out to the Lord who asked what he wanted from him. Bartimaeus gave the obvious answer. He wanted to see again. Jesus acceded to his request and the man was cured.

In the physical sense, ‘to see’, within the Christian perspective, has a far deeper meaning, which has nothing to do with learning or intellectual capabilities. Indeed, Jesus often referred to the Scribes and Pharisees, the learned class of his time, as being ‘blind’. The apostles, after the traumatic experience of Jesus’ passion and death, only came to ‘see’ after the descent of the Holy Spirit upon them. It is then that slowly things started falling into place and they realized what the last years of their life were all about. Christ referred to himself as the ‘light of the world’. Therefore, it follows that the worth of one’s actions is valid as much as it conforms to His teachings. To refuse, for example, to see in the irregular immigrants amongst us the suffering face of Christ and to refuse to help them as much as one possibly can is an indication of blindness and distance from the Lord and His Gospel.

Every society fondly believes that it is far better, under many aspects, than the one preceding it. If there is one field that our developed Western world takes pride in is the firm conviction that it has discarded the doublestandards it believes were so prevalent in past generations. Yet ours is a society where hypocrisy is rampant and the following few examples are clear proof of this.

Paedophilia has been in the news in the last few years and the abuse of children has been rightly condemned. Yet sex tourism to Third World countries involving minors is a thriving business. Certain travel agencies abroad promote sexual services from children and adolescents in developing countries and thousands of men take up the offer every year. The silence in the international media about this is deafening!

It is not a well-known historic fact that before the war started and the Nazis began to kill Jews, gypsies, etc, they had a plan, duly carried out, where around seventy thousand disabled men and women deemed unfit to belong to the super race, and were put to death. Following protests from the Christian churches, the program was stopped. Today, in our ‘enlightened’ Western world, unborn children are often routinely screened so that parents can be offered the option of aborting them if they are found to have some malformation or incurable disease. Now we have even arrived at a point where babies and young children with terminal illnesses can be euthanized if their parents so wish. Can a society be more hypocritical when it allows this to happen while at the same time condemning the Hitler regime and its horrors?

For decades, China has practised a one-child policy (now partially revoked) for families. Anyone defying the law would be heavily penalized. Many parents aspired to have a boy and after pre-natal tests were carried out, the baby, if female, often used to be aborted. Millions of baby girls were forbidden to see the light of day simply because they were girls. The question to ask is, of course, where were the protests from women organizations around the world? Why were feminists not marching in the streets of Europe and the US in order to protest at this abomination?

Another example of our double-standards concerns the recently acclaimed film Filomena, a woman whose child was taken away from her at birth and who went to extraordinary lengths to find out where he was. Today, with heterologous IVF, children are born who are, most often than not, denied by law the right to know who their biological parents are.

Finally, what perhaps constitutes the ultimate example is the presumption that ours is the most tolerant of any society ever known before. This is false because indeed one is allowed to believe whatever one wants, provided only that it coincides with the ‘sole thought’ prevalent among us. Thus, for example, anyone stating that marriage is a lifelong, indissoluble union between a man and a woman, that homosexual behaviour is gravely immoral and that children should be brought up by a mother and a father, is inevitably accused of being bigoted, out of touch from reality and in the future could possibly be sanctioned by the law for declaring this.

Behind all this, then, is the same ‘blindness’ that Christ often accused his opponents of, the same blindness which made them reject and eliminate him, the ‘light of the world’ without whom we can only walk in darkness.