“Tolerance” doesn’t mean “do whatever the hell you feel like doing.”
“Tolerance” means “do the right thing, and allow other people to do what they feel is the right thing.”
When Laura Schlesinger goes on the airwaves talking shit about homosexuals, she is taking it upon herself to tell other people what to do. And people are well within their rights to say that that crap won’t stand. If the government’s trying to suppress her right to free speech, there’s a problem. If some concerned citizens want to stage a boycott to keep people from giving money to support her assholishness, more power to them.
When you have a political party that is actively seeking to deny a big portion of the population their rights, and permanently assign a second-class citizenship status to them, and then you see homosexuals speaking out in support of that, you better believe that’s grounds for speaking up. Am I trying to pass a law saying that gays can’t vote Republican? No, but I sure as hell am saying that they’re seriously fucked up for doing so.
Being “tolerant” doesn’t mean being a pussy. I’m fucking sick of hearing people constantly going on the attack, trying to discriminate against others who are just trying to live their lives, and then crying “hypocrite!” and “what about my rights?!?” whenever anyone tries to stand up to that.
After reading this phrase, I decided that the rest of your post didn’t warrant my attention…Oh that’s right, this is the Pit! In that case, all you close-minded, blind-to-the-world liberals need to start dying a lot quicker and reproducing less. As a matter of fact, why don’t we get the government to help you along? We might as well throw the homeless, elderly, and crippled into the mix as well. Because, of course, conservatives are right up there with fascists, so I’m sure a proposition like that would get quite a lot of support!
Maybe you should step back for a second and ponder the immense possibility that YOU are intolerant.
Pressure by consumers is just another way to express one’s opinion, one which has been used effectively by all parts of the political spectrum for decades. An irritating tactic, if you’re just some guy trying to watch shows or buy products that end up cancelled, but still legitimate. It’s not suppressing an opposing opinion, how could it be? It’s making your opinion heard. If I decide not to eat at Domino’s Pizza any more because I read that the owner supports Operation Rescue and I write to tell him that, how am I suppressing pro-life viewpoints? I’m not.
I strongly support the free exchange of ideas, but that has nothing to do with “tolerance” as a political term. As pizzabrat put quite nicely:
The word “tolerant” has been co-opted to imply “non-confrontational pussy” and it pisses me off. A church can and should preach tolerance toward one’s fellow man. This doesn’t mean they are intolerant for not having one sermon a month delivered by an atheist. One can support civil rights and still tell a KKK member he is wrong and should shut the fuck up without being “intolerant”.
And as a liberal, I can tell Fox News they are a biased piece of shit network who shouldn’t be on the air every single time I see one of their cameras in a public area. That’s not preventing them from existing, that is expressing my opinion of their shitty network. If that has the effect of making it harder for them to broadcast footage which doesn’t contain anti-Fox News messages in it, tough shit. I’m not obligated to make it easy for shitty news networks to broadcast shitty news free of my commentary on how shitty it is.
Perhaps if you read the entire post, you would come across this statement:
And remember, just because a homosexual is Republican does not mean he or she fully endorses the entire Republican message. As such, characterizing them all as messed up is, in my opinion, pretty stupid.
I am conservative or libertarian or neocon or Christian right or none of the above, depending on whom you ask, but they all agree I vote Republican.
I don’t generally wish to kill people for their beliefs (unless those beliefs happen to include things which threaten my life and/or country, at which point all bets are off.
I don’t wish to kill homosexuals, though I think its a sin. I don’t wish to kill abortion doctors, though I believe most of them have at least damned themselves to Hell for an eternity of punishment, and proibably rank well above your average concentration camp guard on the Ol’ Evilometer.
But I don’t think these things are right, nor that I tolerate them. I consider them acts of evil (the latter much worse than the former) and would bother arguing against them except i got tired of ridicule a long time ago, and its not like anyone ever paid attention to my opinions anyway.
Apparently, in the eyes of most Democrats, this makes me Satan incarnate. C’est la vie. I mostly stopped caring about their opinions a long time ago. Not worth the effort, really.
Well, thus far I haven’t actually seen him nor anyone else present actual evidence to support anything he’s said, which is not unusual for politicians. it would be refreshing to see it once.
I was gonna rant about how I disagree with TeaElle’s post 100%, but Giraffe and SolGrundy already beat me to much of what I had to say. So I’ll be brief.
100% wrong for so many reasons. The major one being that consumers have the right to pressure corporate sponsors for what they want. Those sponsors can still fund her if they wanted to. They just don’t want to because they don’t want bad press. Duh. No one is being restricted from doing anything here.
See Giraffe’s response to this, I agree with our prehensile-tongued one. No one is preventing them from broadcasting. Now, if they ran up and physically assaulted FOX newscasters and tried to destroy the cameras, then THAT would be crossing the line.
That’s fine, but voters pressuring corporate sponsors to withdraw ads is not suppressing free speech. Chanting “FOX sucks” (or whatever) is not suppressing free speech. Requesting that an ad full of lies be pulled from the air is not suppressing free speech. You’ll notice that no one is taking the TV networks to court to remove those ads. THAT would be supressing free speech. But “demanding” that TV stations pull the ads is simply a strong public request to “do the right thing”. If a Nazi party ran ads morning noon and night on CBS NBC and FOX, you bet your ass people would “demand” that they be pulled. And they would be, not because someone is oppressing them, but because the backlash of continuing to run the ads would be too great.
Yeah, well unfortunately, some of us don’t have the luxury to just say “well moan moan, nobody listens to me anyway, so I don’t care what you think of me.”
Because you and people like you take it upon themselves to say what is a sin for you is a sin for me as well, and I shouldn’t be allowed to do it. So you propose legislation and vote for legislation that denies me my basic human rights. So I’m forced to listen to you call me a sinner, and I’m prevented from living my life the way I want because you would call me a sinner, and you don’t have to even lower yourself to listen to me say that I’m not. Meaning that apparently, your opinions are more important than my right to live my life. And supposedly, I have to care what you think.
I think there’s some interesting and valid discussion going here. First, will everybody stop yammering about how [liberals/conservatives] are just as bigoted as [conservatives/liberals]? There are decent, tolerant people, and self-appointed regulators of others’ morality, among both groups. And all you are doing by calling the opposition names, is making clear how little you yourself resemble one of the decent, respectful-of-others group.
For me, “tolerance” is a fairly good idea – but like everything else, including moderation, it can be taken to an undesirable extreme. The point at which one should stop being tolerant is when someone begins asserting a claimed authority to regulate the behavior of others in ways not necessary to protect yourself or third parties. (I.e., regulating the behavior of a murderer or pedophile strikes me as a good idea; regulating the behavior of a fundamentalist or a Lesbian does not.)
I can be quite tolerant of intolerance. I cannot be tolerant of that form of intolerance which attempts to shape the rest of the world into what the holder of the opinion feels to be right, regardless of how they may feel about it. And that applies just as much to ban-sermons-against-homosexuality campaigns as it does ban-gay-marriage campaigns.