Iqra’i

Helen asks:

We can debate the behavior of the clerk in question, but the fundamental question is: Should a fifteen-year-old’s experience of buying a pregnancy test be unpleasant for her?

I disagree. I think the question is: Why should it be permissible to invent a law that doesn’t exist for the purpose of shaming an individual whose behavior you feel to be immoral? It’s pretty clear to me that that’s what the clerk was doing — at very least, she was under a misapprehension and didn’t reconsider it in the face of contrary evidence — and in fairness, Helen hasn’t tried to argue otherwise. However, she seems to treat it as of a piece with anything else the clerk could have done: lecturing the girls, handing them a Bible, telling them her register was closed, etc.

I think it is probably true that the transgressing legal norms carries much more shame than transgressing social ones in contemporary America, so it’s likely that nothing the clerk could have done would have been as likely to be effective as what she did. But it seems to me that the right answer in the long term isn’t to appropriate the force of the law — especially when it doesn’t actually exist for this purpose — but rather to reinforce social norms so that they have comparable force.

This is especially true in this situation, when the would-be customer had an advocate with her who actually knew the rule, and therefore “defeated” the clerk by proving her wrong. Had the clerk kept her reaction within the realm of the social, the defender would have looked much more silly and petulant in writing her post — “How dare they judge us at all?” — and Helen’s response would be entirely justified. As it was, the post reads as much of triumph as of righteous anger: “They tried to lie to my friend; luckily, I was with her, and I knew the facts!” It’s extremely difficult to shame someone once she feels you’ve conceded the moral high ground to her.