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In many of the offbeat cases, the implicit demand seems to be that all customary standards, tastes, proprieties and practices must yield to the whims and oddities of the individual. Still other cases seem to envision the abolition of all exclusivity, whether its purpose is malign or not. Exclusive societies of professionals (lawyers, doctors, engineers) exist for perfectly decent reasons. And certain groupings of artists for different decent aims. Yet, federal funds were briefly withheld from a Connecticut school on the ground that its boys' choir, by existing, encouraged sexist discrimination—and never mind the unique musical reasons why boys have always been assembled into singing groups. Government bureaucrats looked ridiculous in that instance because of their failure to admit a common-sense truth: some exclusivity—by race, sex, color and creed as well as by calling—arises not for bad but for good reasons. White Democratic Congressman Fortney H. Stark of California suffered a similar failure a couple of years ago when he applied for membership in the congressional Black Caucus. Questions: Does the congressional
Black Caucus have a right to exist? Would the congressional Black Caucus have ceased to exist if instead of refusing him, it had admitted a white member? The only sensible answer to both questions is yes. The notion of a black caucus with white members is silly on its face. So is the notion of a Jewish club that admits non-Jewish members. For this reason alone, Presidential Counsel Robert J. Lipshutz's resignation from Atlanta's formerly Jewish Standard Club, in protest against its restricted membership, seemed somewhat strange. He was demanding, in effect, that the club relinquish the essence of its nature.
Common sense and reality have both been affronted regularly in the anti-discrimination war. The feminist movement's drive to desex nouns and pronouns was definitively dramatized by the 1976 case of Ms. Ellen Cooperman, who unsuccessfully sought to change her legal name to Coo-perperson. But God only knows—if, indeed, He or She does—how much needless fear of words has been generated by the campaign to cleanse public language of slander, denigration and defamation. It has obviously reduced the use of contemptuous epithets, but it has also unnecessarily inflamed some tender sensibilities. Take the heartfelt claim that all Italians, and not merely an outlaw underground, tend to be stigmatized by the word Mafia. Should the question be: Can this term unintentionally offend someone? Or should not the questions be: Is there an organized underworld? Is it actually called the Mafia? If so, to call it something else is to lose touch with reality.