A TOLERANCE OF TRADITION, A TRADITION OF TOLERANCE
by Erik Jay

For 64 years, the good ol' boy Texas Tech Saddle Tramps have been known across their dusty state as an exclusive booster club; the club has always and only had male members.

Then, at the dawn of the Third Millennium, Jennifer Slattery applied for membership.

The Saddle Tramps say she wasn't denied admission because she's a woman. But, as the Associated Press reported at the time, "the 50-member group has applied for male-only legal designation that would exempt it from an anti-discrimination law. The controversy has evolved into a case of tradition versus tolerance."

Hold on there! Tradition versus tolerance? That makes it sound as if our American tradition on the one hand, and tolerance on the other, were mutually exclusive. Please! Somehow, I doubt the ol' Saddle Tramps waste much time plotting cultural warfare against NOW, then seeking out unsuspecting women whose rights they can abrogate for a game-day doubleheader. Sadly, somehow the definition of tolerance mutated from the notion of live and let live, to a kind of ditzy mutual congratulation, finally to a policy of unequivocal endorsement, even solidarity. If you don't endorse what I do, with proper by-the-book genuflection and ideological fervor, why, then, you desere to be called every ancient and modern synonym for bigot.

But it turns out that the prospective member, Jennifer whozerface, had expressed a very low opinion of these fifty rowdy, raucous, sports-besotted, possibly perspiring, and most assuredly testosterone-drenched self-described "mounted infidels," if you can believe it. I'm getting a picture of some young Jane Fonda confronting four dozen Texas football fans with a demand to join their club. And it's all to make a point, which is this: "I can get the cops/feds/bureaucrats to make you let me in."

She probably can, which would suggest that we've reached the reductio ad absurdum of do-gooder government: You are now required to like everybody, or at least pretend convincingly. Everybody has to like hanging around with everybody else, or you're busted, sued, bankrupted, stigmatized. Worst of all, you're branded: The Scarlet "I" for Intolerant.

Five years later, the case is still slogging through the court system, wasting time and taxes.

And for what? To legitimize state-enforced bonding and sharing? Man, I didn't even talk to my dad all the time (God rest his soul) much less hang out with him or (horrors!) see him every day. And one of the reasons I'm a happily married man of 20+ years is that I don't insist that my wife (God please rest her soul) accompany me everywhere, or share my every interest, or like the same food, or anything else. Please, I really am an adult; I really do go through quite a process deciding with whom in my life I wish to do what, and when, and why, and especially how.

I don't do certain things or go certain places to exclude certain people; I do those things and go those places to be around certain people. If you're one of 'em — for me, another writer or composer or musician or artist or car-hound or conversationalist or eccentric or expert on anything — and you're there when I get there, wherever "there" is, well, you're automatically kith and kin by dint of a shared interest, even if you're not a blond Norse mesomorph. And if you are a blond Norse mesomorph, but without a shared talent or passion, you might as well be from Mars or Venus or wherever.

This really is the way most grown-ups make friends, assuming there's enough varieties of people around. It's a bit tougher in ethnic enclaves, but even there, people's curiosity eventually gets the better of them and circles start to expand.

Family, friends, community — and self. It's a delicate balancing act. And adults (I assume you are one, too) don't need any fat government thumbs tipping the scales.