While the details below relate to just one guy, I’m rolling with it because it illustrates an obnoxious pattern of behaviour that has become way too common. Our saga today concerns a guy who approaches two complete strangers, teen girls, and starts to berate them for wearing “Revealing Swimsuits” that he considered to be “pornographic”.
Did this happen in Iran or Saudi Arabia perhaps?
Nope, this went down last weekend at Horsetooth Reservoir. That’s located near Fort Collins in Colorado.
You can actually see how it all played out. We all carry smartphones, and so the girls recorded the encounter, then posted it to TikToc in two parts a few days ago…
Their initial reaction to him telling them that what they are wearing is pornography, is “We’re not bothering you, please go away”, but he simply ignores that and carries on. He starts babbling religious gibberish at them.
Here is the second clip …
Initial thoughts
How other people dress is quite frankly none of his “f***ing” business, he very seriously needs to “F*** Off”. If they were in fact sitting there butt naked, it is still none of his “f***ing business”.
He was harassing them. After being told to go away, he ignores that and carries on.
As the girls themselves pointed out to him, the bible he claims to believe in is very clear …
And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.
Matthew 5:29
We don’t know who this guy is … right?
Actually we do. Somebody recognised and identified him. His name is Logan Dorn.
This is not an invitation for you to pile in and tell him what you think of him on his Facebook page. Seriously, don’t do that, be better than he is, far far better.
He no doubt thinks he is being “persecuted” for “taking a stand for God” and claims he “Loves all those” criticising him. What is actually happening to him over there on Facebook is very much not that at all. He is being called out for being an utterly obnoxious asshole.
One commenter suggested this …
Dude, your wife caught you staring at other women, and now you are putting up this whole charade to pretend you were staring out of horror for their swimsuits. You’re a phony. You had the perfect opportunity to apologize here, but instead you’re doubling down on your stupidity, blaming people for wearing swimsuits to the beach.
He has now locked his posts, so nobody else can comment.
The Imposition of belief
There is a vast diversity of belief. Some of those beliefs are quite extreme. Perhaps the most famous example of that are the Amish in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. They live today as if it was still 1690 and not 2021.
No electricity, no labour saving devices, no personal photographs, no cars.
What is distinctly important here, the one characteristic that is a considerable contrast to the guy on the beach is this – they might impose all this upon themselves, but they do not demand that anybody else has to conform to their beliefs.
If you were invited over for a visit, you could drive up in your car, and they would happily receive you and not berate you for driving a car. If you took a picture such as the above, they will happily pose and not claim that you are evil incarnate.
The essence of it all is this – they might indeed hold beliefs that, from our viewpoint, are deeply strange, highly restrictive, and also silly, but what they would never ever do is dictate any of that to anybody else.
Some rather obvious thoughts
- If you don’t believe in abortion … then don’t have one.
- If you don’t believe in gay marriage … then don’t marry somebody who is the same gender
- If you don’t believe in drinking … then don’t go into a bar and order a drink
- If you don’t believe watching TV is OK … then don’t buy a TV
- If you do believe you should only dress modestly … then dress modestly
What is simply not ethical is an attempt to impose your religious beliefs on others by force.
Period.
What you should never ever do … ever … is to march up to some teen girls you don’t know and start berating them and telling them how to dress. If you do actually do this, and they then tell you to go away and stop bothering them, then what you don’t get to do by any and every moral standard, even the fundamentally flawed evangelical one you cling to, is to just ignore that request, and carry on berating them.
If you should happen to passionately care about your beliefs, then you do need to be aware that doing stuff like this brings a considerable degree of disrepute upon your variation of belief. Nobody is impressed by stuff like this.
One can perhaps only wonder if this Talibangelical was also concerned that the girls were out and about in public without a male guardian.
How has it all played out for Logan?
He faced an onslaught of people on Facebook telling him that he was being a jerk.
His response?
He puts up a clip of himself in which he doubles down on it all with a claim that his anger with them was “righteous anger”.
Meanwhile his employer saw all this happening online and decided they really don’t wish to employ a guy who is like this, so they fired him.
Sometimes actions really do have consequences.