Virtue shaming

• Date: 05 April 2021
• Author: Rabbi Steven Pruzansky
• Published date: 05 April 2021
• Publication title: Israel National News (Israel)

A British Court ruled last week against an actress who was fired from the production in which she appeared because the lexical archeologists found a comment from her Facebook page several years ago that referred to homosexuality as a sin. For that breach of today's immoral norms, she was fired and ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds in attorney's fees for the prevailing side.

Welcome to the world of virtue shaming, the attempt to denigrate, harass, persecute, cancel and eliminate any person who adheres to traditional morality. It is unacceptable, it has to stop and it will only stop when good and decent people begin to fight back and call it what it is.

Meanwhile, a saner American court last week ruled in favor of a college professor who refused to refer to a male student as "Miss," for, among other reasons, the offense to his Christian beliefs. The Sixth Circuit Court decided that Shawnee State University improperly sanctioned him on First Amendment freedom of speech grounds. Simply put, a professor – by extension, any person – cannot be ordered by any official body to defy reason and common sense and refer to a male as a female or vice versa. If it were otherwise, the court reasoned, "a university president could require a pacifist to declare that war is just, a civil rights icon to condemn the Freedom Riders, a believer to deny the existence of G-d, or a Soviet émigré to address his students as "comrades." That cannot be. This professor, now authorized to sue his university, was also the victim of virtue shaming.

How did we ever reach this stage when virtue shaming dominates public discourse? Intimidation of traditional Jews and Christians is rampant, threats and boycotts abound, and rational discussion is impossible.

Thus it has become objectionable, even deplorable, to speak favorably of a two parent family, of children having a father and a mother, of G-d creating a male and a female, and of the moral norms that guide such relationships. Those moral norms have been the underpinnings of Western civilization. They are being eroded because virtue shaming has become so extant that good and decent people have internalized that they must be doing something wrong. So they cluster in small groups, hide their professions of faith, keep it amongst themselves, endure the deluge of cultural offerings that disparage the beliefs they cherish – or just surrender.

The external censorship is appalling enough; what is worse is the self-censorship, the...