Four seven-year-olds discover a giant slug oozing along the sidewalk, a slimy trail marking its slow progress. “Ewww, touch it,” Kid A says.

“I’m not touching it,” says Kid B. Kids C and D watch from the sidelines with a pretty good idea how this will play out. “You touch it.”

“I’m not touching it,” echoes Kid A.

Kid A and B toss comments back and forth in no uncertain order, usually along the lines of “I dare you” and “You’re scared” and “Am not” and “Are too.” Finally, one kid touches the slug.

“Ewww,” he says, pulling back only slightly surprised that the encounter didn’t lead to death. He rubs snail goo smoothly between his index finger and thumb. Everyone else laughs, he rubs his fingers on Kid B’s shirt (who doesn’t find that part funny), and they run to school.

The next day, the same kids traveling the same path see another slug. They stop for a second. One says something disgusting about slug slime, but no one bends down. They laugh. They walk to school. They never touch a slug again. The group now considers all slugs gross, even though the slug did not choose to be a slug, and the slug has no sliminess control. (It’s mucous.)

Bigotry 101

Yeah, that’s a metaphor, but it’s many people’s theory of bigotry: If you touch something after your group defines it as yucky, you’ve defied the group. With bigotry, that includes “something” black or gay or Muslim or disabled or one of 100 other minorities. For brevity, I’ll call it the YTI (you touched it) bigotry technique. I pronounce it “Yeti,” because I like the symbolic reference to the unsocial Mt. Everest monster. I also like the sound of it. Yeti.

The Amish have a word for it too: shunning. If the Amish mutually agree to avoid someone, they build a social force field. They’re saying, “We’ve decided to aggressively pretend you don’t exist.”

Unfortunately, shunning is preferable to actual bigotry, where contact is allowed in small doses providing it’s delivered as hate.

Cold but real examples

• “You’re probably gay.” People adamantly opposed to gay marriage or just gayness keep believers in the fold by saying this about anyone who has the audacity to make contact with gays: “Why, I wonder, would you consider Steve a good friend if Steve is gay unless, hmmm, maybe you’re gay too?” Ewww, YTI.

• “Nigger lover.” I hate this one; hate writing it. But digging back to my small-town upbringing decades ago, a time when the civil rights movement was recent history, this was the white version of YTI. You either agreed to shun blacks, or you preferred the black race to your own. Bigots offered no in-between options. (Important note: The white participation rate wasn’t 100%, but more than a few stayed silent to avoid shunning.)

• “He’s an Oreo.” Not everyone is cut from the same cloth, and a black that acts “white on the inside” could be ousted. It’s the flip side of the “n-lover” insult noted above, which I won’t write a second time. There is no white or black inside. It’s pretty much red and slimy. (Second important note: The black participation rate wasn’t 100%.)

• “It’s against my religious beliefs.” In 2012, a Colorado bakery shop owner refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple based on religious opposition. The gay couple sued, a court ruled against the bakery, and in August 2015 an appellate court agreed. The key question: Is a business that bakes a cake for a gay wedding supporting gay marriage? As a business, it’s hard to reconcile why anyone would refuse money – that’s why they went into business in the first place, and if you’re a diehard Red Sox supporter, you can still bake cupcakes for the Yankees.

But under the YTI principle, it makes sense. The bakery owner belonged to a religious group that refused to touch gay marriage slug slime. The Kentucky clerk who refused to issue gay marriage licenses followed the same rules.

Your punishment

The reason YTI works is simple: If you break your group’s law, you could become a member of the hated group. Boiled down, it’s: “Don’t get uppity. We have the power to make you one of them. Think we’re kidding? Try us. See if they treat you as well as we do.”

When you write that down, it sounds bizarre. It is bizarre. But that’s the way it works.

This is where I write a conclusion – the sentence that sums up everything that’s come before, followed by a possible solution. The conclusion: YTI is stupid – just stupid. We’re all better people when we work together, laugh together, disagree together.

The solution: I don’t know. Shunning should be shunned, but the people who need to change, I suspect, stopped reading right after the slug metaphor.

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