Entitlement Mentality: You Change! I Don’t Want To.

Back in the early nineties, I’d heard Rush Limbaugh talk about the trustees from a town in California who were proposing an ordinance that would’ve required the local Burger King to offer a vegetarian menu. The motivation behind this ordinance was a group of residents who complained to city hall about the King’s lack of vegetarian menu items.

If this story proved anything, it was to highlight the fact that individuals with an entitlement mentality follow the path of least resistance: require someone else to take the risks of offering a service that could otherwise prove to be an opportunity for an entrepreneur. It also showed how a vocal minority will expect others to change in order to better suit their own needs – or wants. Unfortunately, I haven’t had any luck following-up on this story, so I’m not sure how it ended.

I was reminded of this collectivist temper tantrum while reading about a recent speaking appearance by Belgian Archbishop Andre-Joseph Leonard, which was interrupted by topless activists from FEMEN, a feminist protest group.

Of course, just about every type of activist group has protested the morals of Judaism and Christianity for quite a while. However, the people who are protesting – demanding that some religions change for the sake of one-way tolerance – would better serve themselves if they stopped demanding that others change, and establish their own religion.

It’s not like this hasn’t been done before. In fact, the process is much easier today; nobody will threaten the members of this new “religion” with death – with quite possibly the exception of some Islamists, the ones who actually engage in activities that those protestors accuse Christians of.

But then again, the objectives of these activists are incompatible with the purpose of religion.

In order to work, the followers of Judaism and Christianity need to engage in self-discipline and sacrifice. If the demands of their critics are met, then the abolition of self-discipline and sacrifice would nullify the purpose of their existence.

Now that I think of it, the root of the problem that people have with religion, or even the Constitution, isn’t an “outdated mode of thinking,” it is the burden of self-discipline; this would partially explain the excuse that the Constitution is a “living document”.

Just like religion, the Constitution establishes a deliberate set of procedures that need to be followed in order to work. The backers of the living document concept believe that the Constitution “changes without being changed.” If this were true, then technically, all decisions made by the Supreme Court are “living rulings,” and all laws passed by Congress are living laws. Therefore, rulings made by the Supreme Court could be overturned by lower courts, and local governments could claim to pass laws over the rest of the country; this living nightmare would eventually lead to anarchy.