DISCLAIMER: I am NOT discussing any individual scenario; I haven’t read the link and nothing I say should be taken out of the parameters in which I say it in.
Klal Yisroel is filled with different types of people, all who pride ourselves on our individuality. Everyone has different standards, everyone has different nisyonos. And of course, we have the dictum ?? ???? ?? ???? ?? ????? ??????.
There is a fundamental difference, however, between not judging and accepting. Or, more importantly, there is a difference between accepting their lifestyle and allowing it to filter into your own.
Most of us come from working families, and those who were privileged to have an even more Torahdike upbringing [and yes, i KNOW that the two are not directly related etc. etc.] generally don’t feel a working background to be a problem with schools. And I personally am fine with that.
But I also respect those who don’t. I have an uncle who doesn’t let his kids eat in my house. As far as I am concerned, we keep the best standards London has to offer – which isn’t good enough for him. His children don’t eat at chasunas, they don’t eat any meat which schita wasn’t observed by my uncle. And they look down on me for having a text phone (albeit internet-free), and they look down on me for having internet access (albeit totally filtered). And I respect them for that.
Never have I heard a word from any of them said in a superior fashion, nor any statement about any yiddishkeit preference. My uncle and cousins are warm, nice people. Yet I know that he sends his children to a chassidishe school (Yekkish notwithstanding), because the exposure in Litvishe schools is too much for him, and that he wouldn’t like his kids friends to be like me. And I’m fine with that.
I don’t feel the need to live like that. I am happy with my standards. But I totally understand that if he were to open a school for his children, I wouldn’t be accepted. And I don’t find that unfair. I did read “goyisher books”, I do listen to Eighth Day, and my level of exposure is not something he wants his kids exposed to.
Elitism is the name given to it by those who feel bitter not being accepted, or being labelled to have lower standards. And it isn’t a nice feeling, to recognize that there are those out there who have higher standards, and to feel ‘second rate’. But they are allowed to protect their children, to keep higher standards they feel Hashem wants them to have.
(Obviously: (a) generalizations in standards are always wrong, because people in the ‘lower class’ will always point to specific members of the ‘higher class’ and show how they are in fact just-as-bad-if-not-worse, and point to the guy-whose-parents-are-bts-and-now-has-a-chabura-in-mir. Blanket labels is not the way to set standards. (b) there is a way of doing this. Elitism and superiority are disgusting things, and any expression of this crosses suddenly from ‘protecting your standards’ into ‘i-am-holier-than-thou’, which is horrible.)