Rick Jones, whose excellent blog posts on ethics, academia, politics and life can be read here, at Curmudgeon Central, again delivers the Comment of the Day, on my post about the gay couple asked to hide an innocuous T-shirt message while visiting Dollywood.
“It strikes me that attempting to draw clear lines of demarcation in terms of either content or location is inherently fraught with peril. The best determinant may indeed be the Golden Rule. But that inevitably touches on intent. The purpose of a “marriage is so gay” t-shirt isn’t to “get in the face of” opponents of gay marriage; it’s to make a mildly humorous point about an issue without being strident.
“The guy who wore the “I’m a Muslim. Don’t Panic” t-shirt to the Ground Zero celebration after the killing of Osama bin Laden—not terribly clever, but not at all offensive, either.
I wouldn’t be offended by a t-shirt backing a political candidate I’d never support (I might have an indication of whether to engage in conversation with this person as we wait in the queue, but that’s another matter); I would be by a t-shirt defaming that same candidate: comparing him to Hitler, for example. Yes, intent matters.
“So does locale, but that’s an even dicier business. Dollywood is out? How about a public park? McDonald’s? Are they specifically apolitical, too? You refer to bumper stickers. What about them? Is it OK to drive into Dollywood’s parking lot displaying my political predilections all over my bumper and rear window, but not to walk through the gates with those same sentiments on my shirt?
“It’s inevitable that if I proclaim my intention to vote for Candidate A or cheer for Sports Team X that some supporter of Candidate B or Team Y won’t like it. But whereas you and I might not vote for the same people or cheer for the same teams, we can respect the other’s choice. The PR people at my university were very upset last year when a really great photo of the crowd at one of our big rivalry football games couldn’t be used for PR purposes (to their credit, they weren’t going to doctor the image) because there was one idiot whose shirt wasn’t for our team, but rather against the other guys, and in rather vulgar terms, at that.
“I don’t think there’s anything at all problematic about what that couple did at Dollywood. Nor would a different couple have been out of line for wearing shirts clearly linking them to, say, a church known to be actively opposed to gay marriage. It’s time to invoke the “reasonable person” test. Would a reasonable person take offense at a shirt with overt sexual content, for example? Sure. Would that reasonable person be bothered by something as innocuous as “marriage is so gay”? I don’t think so.”
Ethics Alarms 
This is an eminently worthy comment of the day, but I would add that there is something to consider besides context and intent: understanding. A park visitor wearing a t-shirt with the single lower-case Greek letter lambda is almost certainly supporting lesbian rights, but you have to know the symbol to know this. A visitor to the park on May 28, 2011, wearing a shirt that said BEKA! might cause offense, if the reader knew that the date had been named “Ethiopia’s Day of Rage” by forces opposed to the country’s less-than-fully-democratic ruling party; that “beka” means “enough” in Amharic; and that the protestors had adopted the word as their slogan. A reasonable Ethiopan might have been offended, but I’ll bet the average “reasonable” visitor to Dollywood that day was not.
My own personal favorite example of this (and the reason for this comment? you decide!) occurred in the late 1990’s, when a respected law journal published an article in which I referred to “the fickle finger of fate” (in the TITLE, no less). Anyone old enough to remember the 1960’s would remember the phrase as the title of a funny Laugh-In award and its accompanying trophy. Anyone old enough to remember the 1940’s would remember the phrase as common military slang, and would remember its full form: “f—ed by the fickle finger of fate”. The latter sense was what my title referred to (it wouldn’t have made much sense otherwise), but the journal duly published it, and nobody objected (possibly because nobody but me got the joke).