True.
But: there is no monolithic “we.” You and I undoubtedly agree on many moral propositions, and disagree on many others. The law is the tool by which we as a society agree to impose constraints on behavior, and is a more reliable bellwether of of “we” all agree than any invocation of morality.
This. These people are the sort who can dish it out, but they sure can’t take it. They want to be able to make the lives of everyone else hellish, but are massively, self righteously offended at the slightest amount of criticism in return.
I like what the Great Antibob and RickJay said in posts #6 and #7 but I want to add another: tolerance, in the form we are usually talking about when it comes to politics, refers to non-interference of immutable characteristics, or sometimes characteristics we deem untouchable.
Being black, gay, tall, short, woman, man, or sick are things you cannot change and therefore shouldn’t be negatively affected by others through their intolerance. Some things, like being religious, are things you can change but our society considers that untouchable.
Tolerance is when you accept a person’s immutable characteristics and don’t try to make him go out of his way to acquiesce those characteristics to your preference. So if you tell a gay person to stop being so openly gay, that’s intolerance.
Against bigots who claim intolerance of their own stupid views, we can easily see then that their argument is bullshit because nothing protects bigotry. Its not an untouchable belief, its a stupid one, and definitely not immutable, so you can damn well tell someone to fuck himself for choosing to hold such a stupid belief. Its perfectly ok to be both a tolerant person towards gays and bully a bigot, because he can change, the gay person cannot.
No one who asks a gay person to stop being so gay, or a black person to stop acting so black is tolerant. The correct and tolerant thing to do would be to accept that person as they are because they cannot change who they are. If being gay meant that they get to kiss outdoors in front of kids, then you have to accept that. Otherwise you’re not tolerant.
And to piggyback a bit on what Voyager said in #20:
This, I think, gets to the crux of the issue that people are misunderstanding.
The wedding cake baker in Oregon or Washington or the photographer is providing a service. They are not endorsing the people the service was for. Too many conservatives want to say “If I’m forced to do a job for a gay couple, that mean’s I support it!” No, you fuckwad, it means you’re providing a service. Their mistake is conflating the service provided with the views of the client.
If a Christian baker is forced to make a wedding cake for a gay couple, it does NOT:
-affect the religious views of the baker
OR
-endorse the legitimacy of the couple
That is the mistake of the conservatives who are for the Arizona bill and similar bills. They are idiots. What the baker IS forced to do, and what the photographer should be forced to do, is only one thing: provide the stated service in which their businesses claim to do..
So it is more like this:
-A Christian baker makes a cake for a gay couple is STILL, at the end of the sale, a Christian bigot who hates gays. The cake is not a symbol of acquiescence to the gay agenda, no matter how pink or frilly it looks
-The photographer who takes pictures at a lesbian wedding is STILL, at the end of the shoot, a hateful Christian bigot. The pictures are merely the result of her business, her values stay the same
This doesn’t even need to take into account the more complicated issue of protected classes. As far as I’m concerned, it got nothing to do with protected classes, its simply about provided a business service. Those bigots think that selling a cake or taking a picture makes you gay-tolerant? Do they think selling a cupcake to a child turns back their biological clock, selling a pie to a black guy gives you rhythm to dance, or taking a picture of the Mona Lisa makes you a painter? Fuck no! In the end, they are still fucking bakers and photographers, nothing more, nothing less. Their job is completely and utterly separate from their views
I’m no fan of intolerance to gays. But I do wonder where we draw the line between the kind of discrimination that is legal and the kind that is not.
The legal principle is that we can discriminate on anything we want, as long as it’s not a constitutionally protected class (and as long as state and local laws are silent on the subject).
If a gay couple wants me to bake a cake of a design that I as a cake artiste (that’s pronounced arTEEST, of course) find abhorrent, can I turn down the job? If a hetero couple wants the same cake and I say “no”, am I being OK here but not in the other case?
I agree with Little Nemo that focusing on the law can cause you to lose the big picture, and that we shouldn’t use law as a substitute for ethics and morality. But right now I’m curious about what we think should be the law.
And I confess that while I abhor the concept of someone refusing to serve gays (just as I’d abhor them refusing to serve blacks, which they clearly cannot do thanks to the Constitution), while I abhor it, does that mean it should be illegal?
Should we include sexual identity and preference issues as a protected class? That would be hard to word, since we can’t even do that for GENDER for gosh sakes! (I’m very disappointed that the ERA didn’t pass, despite all the truly stupid lawsuits that would have arisen from it.)
It’s a tough nut, really. I emotionally side with all those here who would prohibit prejudice based on homosexuality. But that’s not what the (national) law says. Do we eliminate any kind of discrimination? That’s impossible.
We either have to make all discrimination illegal except as noted (which would be a real non-starter) or we have to enumerate the kinds of discrimination that are illegal. How do we word it?
Setting aside laws, if I knew of a business that discriminated against gays, I would be very unlikely to do business with them. Would I be discriminating based on religion? (snicker. that’s a rhetorical question. I don’t expect an answer.)
What’s so hard to word about making sexual orientation a protected class?
You could probably work up a false equivalence argument.
What’s so hard about looking at a calendar and saying, “Sorry, I’m booked solid that week-end.”
Why the hell would anyone ever decide to tell someone they did not want to serve them because of sexual practices?
The only reason I can think of is to create an issue.
As mentioned before, there’s an element of false equivalence. Taking steps to relieve and redress oppression is not per se an undue burden on those who earlier held the privilege. (And that’s not counting that, as **Alessan **said, there are worse things than being called a “hypocrite”. That has become the cheap go-to accusation when you want to put someone on the defensive and it’s usually a terribly lame one.)
Then he may be melding “approval” with “acceptance”. “Approval” should not be required nor needed (and being a state of mind, cannot be forced). If I’m in an group targeted by bigotry (and in some orders of classification I am, just not on the gender front) I don’t have to give a rat’s patoot if someone or some group “approves”, they simply must treat me equally and justly and accept that their “approval” is irrelevant.
Well, if I can exercise the fullness of rights freely in the society on the same terms as everybody else, how does it oppress me if somebody is treating me right because it’s become the socially decent thing to do and, hey, it takes all kinds, rather than because he really digs who/what/how I am? Heck, that’s how a lot of people in the mainstream culture manage to make it through their lives!
That’s what people do, already, when they want to discriminate against blacks, or Jews, or handicapped.
Some of us have participated in “sting” purchases. A black woman, one of my co-workers, was told an apartment was no longer available for rent. But when we sent in a white co-worker to ask, the apartment was suddenly available again. We reported the matter to the authorities. If she’d been more organized about it, she could have filed a lawsuit and picked up some money out of it.
If the shopkeeper is “busy that whole weekend,” he’d better stay busy for every subsequent customer who asks, or his ass could very well be grass.
It seems to me that someone could easily reject the idea of making a “penis cake” as suggested by one of the more hysterical people out there that I’ve seen today, but offer to make a different cake with a different design (a rocket ship!) for the gay couple. However, I’m no law expert, so I could be wrong on this. It doesn’t seem any different than a restaurant only offering a limited menu.
Yeah, because when I’m walking down the street, minding my own business, gay people are always coming up to me demanding that I sell them some flowers and it gets on my nerves.
Just last night when I was watching TV in my living room, a gay couple knocked on my door and demanded that I bake a cake for them and therefore I missed the last half of the Big Bang Theory which was really annoying.
Except those things didn’t happen and don’t happen to anyone.
The answer is simple. If you want to be left alone and don’t want people bugging you to sell them flowers, don’t become a florist. If you get all Greta Garbo " I just want to be left alone" when someone asks you to bake them a cake, fine…but you might want to consider not owning a bakery.
It’s simple.
And I bet there are a lot of people in these wedding related industries that consider the potential doubling of their customer base that comes with the legalizing of gay marriage to be a really really positive development.
PS I know people use the wedding industry as an example when debating this subject but I’m a little puzzled at the idea that there are a whole bunch of gay-hating florists out there…I would think one’s rampant homophobia would be a little bit of a drawback to success in the floral industries even without the gay marriage factor.
PPS And who are all these high concept cake-decorating artistes and why are they scared of gay couples? If your cake work is an artistic expression of your style and taste, I would think that you would LOVE the chance to get away from doing Duck Dynasty and NASCAR themed wedding cakes and deal with some gay sensibility.
You’re better off asking the photographer in Arizona or the baker in Washington who refused the gay couple and made that known because they were gay. The opposite isn’t an issue: gays are protected classes in many municipalities and it hasn’t caused any real problems except for bigots.
If I had to guess, some people think they should stand up proudly for their bigotry (religion) and feel offended that they are the ones who have to hide it. Obviously there are a lot of openly hateful people who choose not to use the excuses you gave.
“If you won’t tolerate my intolerance, you’re a hypocrite.” <– This statement is ridiculous. There is no innate obligation to tolerate someone else’s intolerance. There is nothing hypocritical about that.
“I do not tolerate [any] intolerance” is hypocritical. That is the same as “I am intolerant of other people’s intolerance”. The speaker feels entitled to his/her own intolerance but not other party’s. It is completely hypocritical.
Tolerance shouldn’t take precedence over intolerance. Society doesn’t tolerate DUI, rape, or murder, and it shouldn’t. Tolerance would be wrong in those cases, and almost everyone agrees.
B’s retort sounds flippant and obnoxious rather than a constructive solution, but neither one is necessarily right or wrong. In a romantic relationship, both partners need to come to an agreement, and if either partner doesn’t accept it, then leave the relationship.
Regarding the homosexuality issue, a common left viewpoint is that certain religious groups intolerance of homosexuality is wrong and intolerance of their practice is less wrong. This point seems silly. People should have the right to exclude. Employers exclude untalented workers from jobs. People exclude undesirable acquaintances from social circles. Colleges exclude students with poor scores from admission.
If a religious group wants to exclude homosexuals, I don’t see why they should be denied that right to exclude. That is equivalent to denying their right to associate as heterosexuals.
Homosexuals exclude cranky religious types from their trendy reality television shows. They don’t have any obligation to do otherwise.
Voluntary ethnic exclusion is a more touchy, edgy point. But non-white ethnic groups frequently build ethnic-centric groups that exclude other ethnicities. Somehow whites aren’t allowed to do the same thing. It’s not logical at all. Most people aren’t interested in thinking this deeply about the subject.
Huh? 
I thought the *Jews *controlled the media. It’s actually the gayz?
The apparent paradox suggested by the OP is entirely illusory and caused by the use of the word “tolerance”, which is not what this issue is really about. It’s about basic principles and values – the kind of principles that we can agree are important in a civilized society, like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and not prejudging others because of their race or skin color. “Tolerance” implies willingly putting up with something adverse, like “tolerance for error” or “tolerance for assholes”. In that respect I have no tolerance whatsoever, and I don’t apologize for it because I do abide by those principles that free societies consider important.
So how about when a racist exercises his freedom of speech by being a racist asshole? Sometimes one does indeed have to weigh competing values, because life is like that. And one does it by assessing relative degrees of harm to those important values. This is a good example of why rights can never be absolute: the racist asshole may be entitled to his racist rants under free speech, but one needs to draw the line if he is inciting demonstrable harm, like encouraging a mob to violence – this is the basis of hate speech legislation. Ditto for religious nuts who interfere with the lives of others, like creationist lunatics who want to rewrite biology textbooks in contradiction to established scientific fact. They don’t need to be “tolerated”, they need to back off or face legal consequences.
So really, if one can agree on a basic set of societal principles and values, the rest isn’t particularly complicated.
It’s one thing to disagree with, even abhor, opposing views. It’s quite another to want them silenced. And there are those on the left and right who would quite happily gag their opponents, either by new laws or by force of numbers.
That IMO is the big problem. Too many folks want to go past the “you disgust me” phase onto “you must be punished” in some tangible way phase.
Gay man runs a tshirt shop. Tasteless customer wants a graphic of Porky Pig being raped by a well endowed Rainbow. Does he have to provide the service or not?
That’s true, and it’s a problem. It’s human nature to want to silence your opponents, and the best test of free speech is recognizing their right to engage in it. Unfortunately, there’s another side to this, too, and that is the extreme of ideological idealism.
Arguments rooted in ideological idealism always sound more noble and compelling than real-world pragmatism. But the real world is what we live in, and history shows that even the best-intentioned dogmatism is doomed by the curse of unintended consequences if it can’t adapt to real-world experience. You can’t just chisel “speech must never be limited” on a rock and set that up as the universal law of all civilization. Adaptation is as much a key to the success of civilizations as it is to biological organisms, and clinging to extremist ideological purity and stubborn dogmatism that admits no exceptions has never solved anything.
Gay Jews. Duh.
The argument often isn’t that “You’re intolerant of my intolerance”, but, rather. that “You’re guilty of intolerance, too, but a different kind.”
For instance, some of the most racist people I’ve ever known have been liberals,