So I’m told that it is wrong to be judgmental. It’s a progressive mantra that has taken root, a helpful guideline to ensure civil communication among those who disagree. It has some merit but I have come to believe that it can be used to stifle healthy debate. So fair warning: This is an opinion and I am clearly judgmental in it. I’m not even sure that being non judgmental is a good thing.

“Use your judgment Tony” was not an uncommon instruction as I grew up. I spent decades in court where judges adjudicated. They used their judgment to determine right and wrong according to the law. We require our judges to use their judgment as an important tool in our need to ensure the rule of law and law and order in our society. Our primary expectation is that the judges need to be correct in their judgment in order to ensure broad civil obedience. Now I realize that is not quite apples to apples; adjudicating on a set of facts to determine a legal outcome is uncluttered compared for example to adjudicating on changing social landscapes and values.

I come to my ‘adjudicating’ after a lifetime of experiences, layered by now with thick bias some of which I can see, others to which I remain blind. That said, we all have judgment. It is among other things a sophisticated risk management tool developed over eons of human experience. We are given judgment for a reason; to keep us safe and to help us adjudicate our own right and wrong. Besides if we don’t use our judgment, why on earth do we have it.

So fair warning you have. This would a convenient moment to stop reading this post if you have no interest in reading my vacuous and judgmental wanderings. For the those of you who remain, let me proceed.

Two headlines caught my attention in the last few weeks both of them joined by one central fact: nudity.

“Florida Principal fired for showing Michelangelo’s ‘David’ in classical literature class”. No say it ain’t so. He showed students one of the world’s greatest sculptures in a classics course. The outrage. What was he thinking?!

“Australian Swim Club told to Ban Nudity in the Changing Room.” It was a headline that beggars belief! The apparent concern being that children changing for swim class shouldn’t be exposed to naked bodies.

This is what the word STUPID is for. I told you I would be judgmental. I mean Come on Man! What kind of puritanical headlock have we submitted ourselves to? Goodness me the trauma and the damage a child will experience seeing a naked human body while changing into a bathing suit. I know we are all appropriately inhibited when it comes to our bodies but few things could distort an everyday childhood right of passage as we grow through our formative years more than banning nudity where nudity is absolutely normal. One might as well say to the child “The human body is bad and must be covered at all times.” What could possibly go wrong with that child’s development!

As for the ‘David’ thing well, that is enough to make my inner Italian shake my head. Any visitor to Italy will be overwhelmed by the extraordinary classical art. Museums displaying some of the world’s greatest art. Public places and piazzas in villages and towns throughout the country with remarkable monumental sculptures. I can remember visiting Greve in 2007, a small village in the heart of Chianti and Tuscany. As we drove into the piazza of this 14th century village we passed by a magnificent metal torso, as I recall about 20′ tall. There was no missing it. It was a metal sculpture of the human male torso complete with what one would expect to see on a make torso; a penis and I might add given the overall size of the sculpture it was an impressive appendage indeed. It is still there. Of course it is. Italians have celebrated the beauty of the human form in their art and literature from before the Renaissance. They would I suspect have no time for this abject nonsense roaming our land. Michelangelo’s ‘David’ is neither prurient nor salacious, nor does it reflect the moral decline of Italians. It is just a beautiful sculpture of the human form. Spectacular indeed but no more than that.

An everlasting impression of my time in that magnificent country is just how at ease Italians appear to be with the human form, male and female, dressed and naked. I suppose two thousand years of culture and the work of a generation of Renaissance artists have left a deep impression.

And now this. What the hell! And to be sure this is me being judgmental. What are we doing? In what unhealthy world does a teacher lose his job because his students are shown one of the greatest sculptures in history, a celebration of the human male form as remarkable in its creation as in its inspiration through time.

In what off balance world are we living that requires life guards to change without revealing their naked bodies? I know that it happened in Australia but it doesn’t seem a big stretch to imagine it happening to us in Canada. I live in Nanaimo BC on Vancouver Island on Canada’s west coast and swim at the Nanaimo Aquatic Centre. Accomodations are made for the shy or for those requiring privacy for religious or other reasons but it is not unusual in the men’s changing room to have twenty bodies, ages ranging from 8 to eighty, in various states of undress. Equally, in the shower six or seven naked men at any one time just going about the business of showering up. Nothing could be more normal. What makes it abnormal are declarations in whatever form that we must cover up. That it is harmful to be naked among one another. What a bunch of poppycock!

I know these stories happened in the US and Australia and we can dismiss them as something that would never happen here. But they can and will unless we use our own judgment and speak up when the time comes. As it will. One of the great things about being Canadian is that we are a respectful, compliant bunch intent on being open to all concerns. One of the great failings of being Canadian is that we sometimes fail to stand firm in the face of patent nonsense. Judgmental I’ll give you. Patent nonsense it remains.

Now fair disclosure, I am the son of English parents which means that I consider it my birthright to express a firmly held opinion with every drawn breath. As I write, I can hear my mother and what she would say to this tide of uptightness washing over us.

“Oh do shut up!”

Or perhaps she means me.

So I will.