Redstate

Could you and I share a beer, and talk idly about politics, in peace?

Probably. My coworker--the person I relieve every morning, and overlap shifts for about three hours, is an evangelical Christian and dedicated Bush voter. He and I (against both our better judgment) discuss politics in the mornings and while we get incensed at times, we've both done it enough to know where the lines are and how to back away from them. That's tougher to do online.

I'm afraid that cannot be helped.

I cannot speak for anyone else, but to me, when someone is hostile towards homosexuals and their desire for equality, that belief and the actions that flow from it are unjust to others. Because they are so, I do not think that they ought be tolerated.

So you set justice above tolerance. I am glad. My point is that if you set tolerance above justice, you will have tyranny.

We both say that at some point injustice cannot be tolerated. I say homosexuality is injustice. You say condemnation of homosexuality is injustice. This is a real disagreement. But disagreement is a fact of life.

Where tolerance comes in, as I see it, is when disagreement -- and especially deep disagreement -- is encountered in personal life. Could you and I share a beer, and talk idly about politics, in peace? I feel confident enough of my tolerance for disagreement -- again, even deep disagreement -- to say yes. I have certainly manitained amicable relationships with those who disagree strongly with me on this issue before. I would like to think that the open affirmation of Christian morality, not as a purely personal thing, but as a public ethic, is not outside the tolerance of my fellow citizens; but if it is, I will indeed judge their Tolerance hypocrisy and oppression.

However, I have been known to react like a hothead now and then, and would like to say that I appreciate your final paragraph.

...concrete implication, that of judging from a position of superiority, a suffering-of-fools, rather than of coexisting with or enduring as an equal.

There's an exclusivity to the word "tolerance", just as there is to the word "diversity", at least as those words are employed in the Leftist Lexicon, that render both single-word oxymorons.

--furious

What is really germane, to my mind, in this digression, is the rapidity with which you abandoned the very principle you affirmed. Your tolerance for my judgment of humanity sexuality, which is of course only the judgment I have received from the tradition of faith I profess, ceased the moment our disagreement was clear to you.

I cannot speak for anyone else, but to me, when someone is hostile towards homosexuals and their desire for equality, that belief and the actions that flow from it are unjust to others. Because they are so, I do not think that they ought be tolerated.

That is not hypocrisy. That is not inconsistency, or an abandonment of principle. That is consistently applied principle. It sounds to me as if you are conflating that with the actions of those who are truly bigoted, and smugly declaring that "that is Tolerance". You couldn't be more wrong in that evaluation.

However, I seem to have made the same conflation towards you. I have cast aspersions on your motivations, which I can only deduce and can never know. I retract them. I apologize for my intemperance; the subject of gay rights is very close to my family and I probably ought not discuss it here, as it raises my ire.

Let's not mince words, here--you know as well as I that one of the most common contexts for invoking a desire for "tolerance" is in the treatment of gays and lesbians. Your opinions about them are well-documented and easily reviewed from your past postings. So please don't pretend that I need to meet you in order to form an informed opinion about the words you write and how they reflect your motivations. When you write this: ...

--you are arguing that a Tolerant state requires that those for whom we request tolerance are "vicious", their practices "evil" and "vice". Your words were quite unequivocal. If you do not hold the opinion that homosexuality is any of the above, that it is a foul thing that a Virtuous state should not tolerate, then I will humbly offer both my apologies for making unwarranted assumptions about you, and my confusion as to how this and your past writings on the matter could possibly be misconstrued. And I will trouble you no more.

If, as I truly suspect, you do in fact hold those opinions of those whose only crime is love and attraction for the same sex, then I stand one hundred percent behind what I wrote: that you are arguing against tolerance because it stigmatizes your prejudices as harmful to the fabric of society, and you desire the freedom to practice those prejudices without social sanction.

Hi.

Now, you and I have had our moments. No way around that. And you're at least reasonably careful to couch your comments fairly well, given the audience and nature of the site.

But the line ends here.

This is not Obsidian Wings. If any lesson may be drawn from that sludge pool, it is this: Allowing commenters to call moderators and other commenters racists, bigots, and worse, is a sure way to create a less honest version of Democratic Underground.

The goalpost moving and inherent dishonesty in this comment, and the excerpted portions, are not my problem. The logical difficulties would be fun to parse any other time.

For now, it will suffice for you to retract your comments about Paul. To forestall the inevitable conversation and posturing on your end, I'm sure losing your posting rights here will be No Big Thing™ and that You Won't Shed a Tear.™ Ditto yours truly when I have to do it. However, I'm trying very hard to be more generous in my banning behavior -- as yet, to no avail -- so I'm giving you a nice, sweet little chance to withdraw the personal shots.

I await your decision.

Tolerance is about justice.

I accept that you believe this. What I cannot accept is your attempt to conflate or confuse the two. Justice and Tolerance are distinct principles; the attempt to fuse them into one, if made a project of politics, will issue in the tyranny we are discussing.

You are arguing that a Tolerant state requires that those for whom we request tolerance are "vicious", their practices "evil" and "vice". Your words were quite unequivocal. If you do not hold the opinion that homosexuality is any of the above, that it is a foul thing that a Virtuous state should not tolerate [. . .]

For God's sake, man, I do not aspire to build the Virtous State. I only made mention of it as an abstraction, offered by way of illustration. I guess if pressed I would say I would prefer the Virtuous State over the Tolerant State, but neither is my own ideal. If your beef is with someone who aspires to erect a Virtuous State, you have got the wrong man. Whatever Platonism is in me is refined by a robust appreciation of the doctrine of Original Sin. I do not believe any ideal state can be built, though I think improvements on what we have can certainly be made.

Yes, I do believe homosexual sex to be a sin; but then I agree with the Roman Catholic Church in believing that contracepted sex is a sin, and probably the graver sin. But something tells me you are not much interested in my theology.

What is really germane, to my mind, in this digression, is the rapidity with which you abandoned the very principle you affirmed. Your tolerance for my judgment of humanity sexuality, which is of course only the judgment I have received from the tradition of faith I profess, ceased the moment our disagreement was clear to you. That (to repeat) is Tolerance, folks.

For now, it will suffice for you to retract your comments about Paul.

In order to decide whether I can do so I need to know what, specifically, you found objectionable. Alleging that Paul harbors prejudice and bias towards homosexuals is a reasonable conclusion that anyone reading his postings and comments on the subject can easily reach, and I don't think what I said was unsupportable. Conjecturing that his bias is behind his motivations for arguing against "tolerance" may qualify as mindreading and was probably over the line.

On the chance that I was wrong, I asked him in the part you quoted to confirm or deny that this was the case, and said that I would apologize if I was wrong.

I would like to hear Paul's answer. If I'm wrong, I will retract and apologize without qualification. If I'm right, I stand by what I said.

The decision of whether or not to ban me is, of course, in your hands. I would prefer to continue participating here. But you have your principles--and I have mine.

Paul has responded, and I to him. I wish I could offer something unqualified, but what I wrote to him is the best I can do without being dishonest or untrue to what I believe.

If that's sufficient, I'm dropping this thread here, as I have no wish to engender any further ill will.

If it's not, then I have enjoyed my time here and wish you well.

The moment it is disclosed that he denies the first principle of the State, that he judges some (favored) things intolerable, he is revealed as a subversive. There can be no quarter for him.

I've experienced it myself.  The logic of "tolerance" among self-professed champions of tolerance, in practice, dictates that everyone in the group can only disagree insofar as the means, not the ends or the righteousness of the cause.  To question any of the core principles of the group is tantamount to heresy.  In practice, here in the 21st century, you don't get burned at the stake or stoned to death -- instead you are simply marginalized, not listened to.  

People who doubt that have never dealt firsthand with a real totalitarian who absolutely does "confounding a tolerated evil with a positive good" -- but I have.  And it is an Iron Law in dealing with such people that disagreeing with them fundamentally, on a question of principle, is verboten.

we cannot avoid this problem no matter what we do. If the tolerant become intolerant (and we object to their intolerance) what are we to do: be intolerant toward the tolerant? There's a paradox of infinite regress in that one.

But of course we need not deal in single-value absolutes. Tolerance is indeed a virtue, but it is not the only one. And any virtue if taken to extremes to the exclusion of all else, becomes a vice: this is true of tolerance, of courage, of temperance, of loyalty, of love itself. The solution is a messy one because we can never achieve it with some rote formula encompassing all things. But the old Greek maxim points us in the right dircetion: "Nothing in Excess"; as too does Christ's counsel: "Do unto others..."

-- it is a virtue of interpersonal relationships, not of politics. Otherwise, I agree with your counsel of temperance. It is the apostle of Tolerance who do not.

  the meaning of words, the rest comes easy.  So it is with the word "tolerance".  The use of the word has narrowed to the point where it contradicts it earlier definition, to where it defines certain political goals while blotting out dissent.

     Tolerance now excuses, even encourages, expressions of hatred with no sense of inconsistency on the part of the user.

      I'm rather satisfied that the issue is coming to the surface in Provincetown.  If debate, criticism, and dissent constitute a two way street then this is ultimately a good thing.

This from his dissent in Harper v. Poway Unified Sch. Dist. (where he would have held that the student's t-shirt saying "homosexuality is shameful" in response to a school sponsored pro-gay day was protected by the First Amendment.  Two others on the 9th (w/ Judge Reinhardt writing) thought this message too offensive to receive First Amendment protection while believing that pro-gay t-shirts would be protected.)

"Indeed, tolerance may not always be a virtue. Tolerating wicked conduct, bigotry or malicious gossip, for example, may not be in the least commendable.  Then there is a question of whether we should tolerate intolerance, a question as imponderable as a Mobius strip.  Whether tolerance is a good or a bad thing may turn on what we think about the thing being tolerated."

Exactly.  

"In practice, here in the 21st century, you don't get burned at the stake or stoned to death -- instead you are simply marginalized, not listened to."

Wow, that's terrible.  Goodness knows everyone should listen to you.

Put him in a rund room and tell him to sit in the corner...

it is the first step in the process of making those not holding the views of the group in power into the "other," someone not worthy of the considerations and rights that inhere to those who are members of the group.

Once "otherness" is established, there really are no limits on how the "others" are treated.  The most decisive step the Nazis took towards the Jews was to make them into non-persons as a matter of law.  Once that was done, there were no limits on what could be done to them.

In a completely secular group where absolutes are denied as underpinning or constraining group acts, the only absolute becomes the expressed will of the group in power.  I am always impressed by how many Nazi-era German court cases ratifying truly horrible acts refer to "the healthy opinion of the Volk."

That everyone should listen to me, or especially me alone.  But I've personally dealt with the "Wall of Silence" when opposing views are broached on matters of principle, and frankly it's a very destructive and counterproductive process.  It usually ends badly, and in my case, it most certainly did.  

as well, as witness the defusing of religious violence in the European past under the rubric of religious toleration. Governments above all else should not be in the business of picking winners and losers in matters of theology and morality. But again, when governments attempt to impose tolerance on the public (rather simply practicing it in public matters) the result is much the same as when governments try to impose any other personal virtue, like temperance or faith: it just plain don't work.

It's quite simple, really: when a community endeavors to make Tolerance its governing ideal, it will end up intolerant. The paradox is resolved once it is realized that King Tolerance forbids tolerance for the "intolerant" -- which in this case means merely any who affirm traditional morality. How can a polity, which has made a certain principle or idea its master, embrace its opposite?

This first argument is pure moral relativism from someone I would've thought abhorred it. The crux of your objection to the notion of "tolerance" seems to be that by definition it requires that we be intolerant of the intolerant. This, frankly, is a grade-school sophistry. It's like saying that if someone abhors violence, they cannot act violently to stop violence committed against them. You should know better.

It's easy to make too-clever-by-half arguments based on the most generic possible definition of the words "tolerance" and "intolerance", and claim a contradiction that doesn't exist. But that's a red herring. You are aghast that society is changing in such a way that your prejudices no longer in the mainstream, no longer acceptable to practice. Cloak this all you like in rhetoric that makes it sound like you're taking a principled stand against the forces of evil--in the end, what you really seek is the freedom to be unkind to those who are different, those against whom you bear some ill based on bias or prejudice, but without earning the scarlet letter of being labeled "intolerant".

Ironically, the very logic that underpins your second argument--that there are some things that are so intrinsically wrong that we must not tolerate them--is the same logic that drives "tolerance", and the demand that it brings that we must be intolerant of the intolerant. If you thought about this for a minute and applied your own reasoning to the rhetoric of tolerance that you decry, you'd realize that reasoning supports it instead of demolishes it. But by all means, if your principles require it, continue tilting at the windmills of progress.

It's like saying that if someone abhors violence, they cannot act violently to stop violence committed against them.

He can act violently only because there is something which he sets above Nonviolence as his principle. Justice, let us say.

If you are prepared to say that we must set some things above Tolerance, then we are in happy agreement. But the whole trend of the modern doctrine of Tolerance is to set nothing above it, which means that it must issue in rigid intolerance.

what you really seek is the freedom to be unkind to those who are different, those against whom you bear some ill based on bias or prejudice, but without earning the scarlet letter of being labeled "intolerant".

And so, without ever meeting me, you have judged me guilty of a desire "to be unkind to those who are different" and of "bias or prejudice." That's Tolerance, folks.

change does not make one a progressive, as much as the mind numbed Left would like us to believe that.

There are those of us who believe that some things are just plain wrong and that we don't have to tolerate them.  That intolerance is expressed by degree in that I can intolerate you to the point of taking your life for murder or your freedom for theft or I can simply not associate with you or ridicule you for other things that I choose not to tolerate.

There are others who don't believe that anything is inherently wrong except perhaps if some majority of some group has achieved a consensus that it is wrong.  I choose to have little tolerance for the "right for me" or "true to me" crowd.  Fortunately, outside the trust fund babies, celebrities, and academia, most of these people are too addled to have much effect on society, though they do help to keep the price of labor down, as in did you learn to serve fries as a part of your degree program?

  is a situation where people[ gays] who demand tolerance appear, might, be practicng intolerance.  that the word has become, let's say, perverted.  What can't be tolerated is a mixing or destruction of meaning and practice.  That to do so strikes at a fundament of society, actually two, the tolerance or abiding of various types of opinions and actions, and the common use of language.

     The people in Provincetown are not "tilting at the windmills of progress",  {are windmills progressive?].  They have noticed that tolerance is a one way street and some of them are foolish enough to believe that they not be subject to the bigotry of a group that expects what they seem less willing to offer.

     Realizing that the problem is bigger than a medium sized town, it is to be taken as a symbol or example.

He can act violently only because there is something which he sets above Nonviolence as his principle. Justice, let us say.

You are correct. Tolerance is about justice. Those of us who believe in it believe that it is in the service of justice, equality, and the principles on which this country was founded that tolerance is made a virtue.

Those who are intolerant of others who are different, whose difference causes no harm other than to insult the sensibilities of those who disagree with them, believe that those prejudices are unjust. This comports precisely with your quoted reasoning.

And so, without ever meeting me, you have judged me guilty of a desire "to be unkind to those who are different" and of "bias or prejudice." That's Tolerance, folks.

No, that is the reasoned evaluation of the rhetoric you have consistently employed towards--for example--homosexuality. Let's not mince words, here--you know as well as I that one of the most common contexts for invoking a desire for "tolerance" is in the treatment of gays and lesbians. Your opinions about them are well-documented and easily reviewed from your past postings. So please don't pretend that I need to meet you in order to form an informed opinion about the words you write and how they reflect your motivations. When you write this:

In the Virtuous State, the charity and magnanimity for the vicious would cease the moment the latter proclaimed their vice virtue; the moment they became subversives, and sowed sedition by confounding a tolerated evil with a positive good.

--you are arguing that a Tolerant state requires that those for whom we request tolerance are "vicious", their practices "evil" and "vice". Your words were quite unequivocal. If you do not hold the opinion that homosexuality is any of the above, that it is a foul thing that a Virtuous state should not tolerate, then I will humbly offer both my apologies for making unwarranted assumptions about you, and my confusion as to how this and your past writings on the matter could possibly be misconstrued. And I will trouble you no more.

If, as I truly suspect, you do in fact hold those opinions of those whose only crime is love and attraction for the same sex, then I stand one hundred percent behind what I wrote: that you are arguing against tolerance because it stigmatizes your prejudices as harmful to the fabric of society, and you desire the freedom to practice those prejudices without social sanction.

You are employing it to mean what you wish it to mean.

Everybody is intolerant of what they regard as bad, including you. Different people have different opinions as to what is bad and ought not be tolerated.

It's a lot like "freedom". Everybody is in favior of freedom, with the usually unspoken assumption that everyone else will use their freedom only in ways that we regard as acceptable.

you are arguing against tolerance because it stigmatizes your prejudices as harmful to the fabric of society

I'm pretty sure he is arguing against your trying to seize the word "tolerance" to describe your own position while pinning the "intolerant" label on those you disagree with. It strikes me that your prejudices are more harmful to the fabric of society.