A Little Bit of Christianity Is a Dangerous Thing

COMMENTARY: Christian virtues, like Christian doctrines, turn menacing when taken in isolation from each other

A high school in Canada recently canceled Mother’s Day (as well as Father’s Day) because it is not “inclusive.” The celebration of Mother’s Day in Canada goes back to 1915, only seven years after it was founded in the United States by schoolteacher Anna Jarvis as a special tribute to her late mother. When President Woodrow Wilson made it an official holiday in 1914, he introduced the apostrophe so that on Mother’s Day, each family would honor its one and only mother. In so doing, no doubt without thinking about it, he ensured that Mother’s Day would not be “inclusive.”

The notion of mother is both personal and specific. It is not an enigma. It does not include anything that is not a mother. And yet, the powers to be have decided to cancel something because it is not what it is not! Using this method of canceling something because it is not what it is not, by logical extension, would justify canceling anything that is not what it is not. And since nothing is not what it is not, then, by employing this violation of the principle of contradiction, everything should be canceled.

Dostoevsky claimed that human stupidity is “stupendous.” Yet, canceling Mother’s Day because it is not inclusive (which it never claimed to be) goes beyond stupidity. There must be another explanation why people, especially those in education, would rule in such a hare-brained manner. For well over 100 years in North America, people celebrated Mother’s Day for exactly what it represents — a way of honoring and celebrating one’s mother.

The inclusive strategy is essentially unrealistic — if used, it will inevitably backfire. A marketing official for Bud Light decided to be more “inclusive” and authorized a controversial transgender activist to appear on one of its beer cans. The result was catastrophic. The company lost more than $5 billion in sales within a few days and suffered an overall consumption drop of 26%. In being more “inclusive,” Anheuser-Busch lost, and therefore, “excluded,” a good percentage of its loyal beer drinkers. Meanwhile, two other brands of beer, Coors and Miller, have enjoyed sales boosts of 20.5 and 21%, respectively. Bud Light’s “inclusive” strategy worked very nicely — for its competitors.

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