“Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it’s a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from.” Al Franken.

I’ve learned something over the last couple of days. Actually, I’ve learned several things. I’ve learned that you can really piss people off if you give any hint of an opinion to either side of a controversial social issue; I’ve learned that people are very passionate about their views on those issues and will argue their points supporting them even if the discussion does not directly involve said issue; I’ve learned that you can disappoint people because of those views; I’ve learned that making a casual statement supporting one side of certain issues spurs others to believe you are passionately standing on that issue.

My last posting was about some news items and blog postings that had caught my eye that day. The web-cam image in my sidebar had the typical RDF weather conditions in St. John’s and struck me as blogworthy. A couple of CBC News feed stories perked my senses, one about a St. John’s woman treated unjustly by a Universal Studios employee because she was breastfeeding her child in a public area of the them park and another story about Ottawa’s plans to impose heavy fines on smokers who smoke within 30 feet of a bus stop. Finally, I read a blond joke that I hadn’t heard before. (Insert double-take here… HOLD the phone Steve… back up a couple of sentences.)

Did I type the word “breastfeeding”? Uh oh. Steve! You are such a moron!

Take this post as kind of a qualified retraction of my opinion. Firstly, I’m not that passionately opinionated about the issue of publicly displayed breastfeeding. I have been witness to it on several occasions in my lifetime. It attracts neither disapproval nor matter-of-fact approval from me. It does attract the same kind of curious, looking-out-of-the-corner-of-the-eye whisper-to-your-companion kind of attention as would a homosexual couple openly displaying their mutual affection in public. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. (Ok, I’m not gay-bashing, I’m just saying… oh, no… am I digging another hole?) It’s simply not ubiquitous enough to blend into the background unnoticed.

The real point I so poorly attempted to make was that folks should not be offended about others noticing you doing something that challenges the currently established social or cultural norm. For example: Yesterday, living together outside the sanctity of marriage was considered “living in sin”. Today, marriage without this “test drive” is uncommon. So, yesterday, it might have been common for people to have been met with social pressure or criticism for shacking up outside of wedlock. Today, it’s met with a shrug. No big deal. Yesterday it would have been unreasonable to expect premarital cohabitation to be accepted outright. Today it would be unreasonable to be morally questioned for the exact same thing.

This young lady was simply doing the natural thing. She was providing her child with life-giving nourishment in the way that biology intended. It would be hard to argue that she wasn’t doing what was best for her child. But… and there is a but… she did so in a city that was not her own, in a country that she was a guest in, in a culture that is not openly accepting of this oh-so-natural act of love. While it is arguable that the Universal Studios employee was being unreasonable in her stance (this is evidenced by the public apology issued by the company), it is equally arguable that it was unreasonable for this lady to expect that what she did would be automagically accepted by all who observed her behaviour.

So, ladies… feed you children to your heart’s content. Line them up two by two and sell tickets to the show. Sell the extras to Tim Horton’s and Cracker Barrel for all I care. Unless I feel strongly about it, you’ll not see me write about this anytime in the near future. I’ll keep my posts benign and limited to non-controversial topics like genetic engineering, stem cell research, religion in schools, religion in general, vegetarianism, affirmative action, capital punishment, right-to-life, the seal hunt, corporal discipline, cloning, gun control, circus animals, euthanasia, censorship, hunting, sex education, gambling, and whether Miller Lite has great taste or is less filling.