Judgmentalism

Years ago it was fairly common to hear conservatives and/or Christians criticized for being "judgmental" for alleging that tragedy or disaster was God's punishment for personal or national sins. Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment on New Orleans for its decadence. 9/11 was God's judgment on the U.S. for our moral corruption.

Such claims were ill-considered and foolish and deserved ridicule, but whether someone is guilty of "judgmentalism" appears to depend a lot on who's doing the judging.

For instance, Jim Geraghty talks about this in his column at National Review where he writes that,

During the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, a lot of Americans had to learn or realize that, whatever you felt morally about a homosexual’s behavior in the bedroom, no one deserved to die a painful death because of those actions. AIDS was not God’s judgment on gay people; a loving God doesn’t sit around thinking up new ways to inflict pain upon His creations, even for violating His commandments.

We had to separate our views of particular actions and their morality from the need to help the suffering.

Geraghty is right, of course, but in recent years things have changed. Self-righteousness, intolerance and judgmentalism, once considered at best boorish, have become socially acceptable, especially on the left. Geraghty continues:

And then Covid-19 came along, and it became really socially acceptable to pass moral judgment on those who contracted a dangerous contagious disease.

Some of us argued against this, over and over again, but there were plenty of finger-wagging, self-righteous social-media scolds who insisted that those who had caught Covid-19 must have failed to wear a mask, or failed to social distance, or had somehow failed to follow the rules.

Yes, there's no monopoly on sanctimoniousness in our society. With this in mind it'll be interesting to see how people react to the latest health hazard should it reach our shores. Geraghty again:

I mention all this because there’s a good chance that the recent monkeypox outbreak is, er, connected to certain behaviors and actions: “A leading adviser to the World Health Organization described the unprecedented outbreak of monkeypox in developed countries as ‘a random event’ that appears to have been caused by sexual activity at two recent raves in Europe.”

A separate report noted that, “Almost all of the case clusters include men aged 20–50, many of whom are men who have sex with men (MSM).”

Monkeypox doesn't appear to be anywhere near as serious as AIDs or Covid, nevertheless, will the same people who chastised anyone who refused to wear a mask or get vaxxed also chastise those who engage in sexual practices that result in the spread of monkeypox?

Probably not. Whether behavior is condemnable too often, for too many people, depends not upon the behavior but upon who engages in it.

For the left the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers were often "Don't Tread on Me" Trumpsters and therefore merited scorn. Those who engage in reckless promiscuous homosexual behavior are, well, engaging in behavior that progressives often find fashionable and therefore demand be treated sympathetically:

“It’s important to pay more attention [to the disease], yes, but it’s a mistake to oversimplify, and, more than anything else, it’s totally wrong to assign any blame,” Tobias Oliveira Weismantel, managing director of the Munich AIDS Hilfe support group, said in an interview. “It’s misguided to attribute it to any particular group.”

“It’s really important to avoid panic and stigmatization,” said Markus Ulrich, a spokesman for Germany’s Lesbian and Gay Federation. “Yet that’s exactly what a lot of gay men are seeing right now in the language from the health minister and Robert Koch Institute. They need to take a look at how they’re communicating this. They need to enlighten without stigmatizing anyone.”

In the U.S., the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the HIV Medicine Assn. issued a joint statement Thursday condemning the "use of racist and homophobic language" with regard to the monkeypox outbreak.

...Stigma has no place in medicine or public health."

So, to criticize behavior which facilitates the spread of a disease would, in this case, be homophobic bigotry. Criticism of those who refuse to be vaxxed, on the other hand, is righteous reproof of the immoral and ignorant.