Being able to go about your day without having to explain why you belong is an easily overlooked freedom. You can disagree with your neighbours, irritate them, live in ways they find peculiar, and still expect to be treated fairly. Once that expectation becomes conditional, ordinary life acquires another job: persuading other people that you deserve the security they take for granted.
Ukrinform reports that the Council of Europe has urged Ukraine to strengthen protection for Roma and LGBTI people against discrimination. The supplied report does not establish the details of the proposed measures. But the call invites a consideration that reaches well beyond one country: how much understanding should anyone have to secure before they can rely on protection?
Understanding matters. Familiarity can loosen a prejudice that argument has barely touched. Yet making understanding the gateway to fair treatment leaves the person facing discrimination with an extraordinary burden. They must become an educator, perhaps an unusually patient one, while also getting on with their own life. Someone else gets to remain unconvinced.
There is a complication here. Protection needs laws and institutions, and neither can manufacture affection. People may comply while privately holding the same views. That can look like a shallow achievement if the ambition is a society in which everyone feels welcome.
Still, reliable restraint has considerable human value. A person should not have to wait for a neighbour’s moral development before being able to live safely alongside them. Nor should protection depend on being charming, successful or an exemplary representative of a whole group. Equality would be a curious arrangement if only the exceptionally likeable qualified.
For the rest of us, this makes responsibility rather less comfortable than expressing sympathy. It means noticing when we demand an explanation from one person that we would never ask of another. It means refusing to let familiarity decide whose mistreatment deserves attention.
There may be people whose lives we never fully understand. They still need to be able to get through an ordinary Tuesday without our understanding being a condition of their freedom.