Oh, bullshit. This is nothing new. Until very, very recently this wasn’t even up for debate: the moral code was determined by the faith of the ruler/ruling class. Now it is up for debate, and those among the religious who enjoyed lording their authority over others are panicking. So now it’s about “tolerance”.
Well, fuck that. I don’t care if your belief in God tells you you have to hate gay people, your belief in Allah tells you that you have to kill your daughter for sleeping around, or your belief in Quetzcoatl tells you that you have to sacrifice human hearts to the Great Feathered Serpent. Sincere religious belief is NOT a free pass to do whatever you want.
Moral relativism is bullshit. I recognize that my conception of morality is probably not the best one possible, and that it is doubtful that any human society will ever reach that point. What that point would look like is super debatable. But none of that means that we should shrug and say “well, I guess if those people believe that gay people are evil and should have their lives ruined, who are we to argue?”.
I realize that by my logic, people who are - for example - anti-abortion should fight against abortion as hard as they can. And sure, I agree with that. If you truly believe that abortion is murder, then taking extreme measures to stop it is a totally rational thing to do.
There certainly are a significant number of people who believe someone who expresses a view they disagree with on gay marriage, or other hot-button topic, deserves to be fired, boycotted, socially ostracised, etc. In London a pastor was arrested for preaching against gay marriage (he was taken away in handcuffs and held overnight, and then released without charge). This is not tolerance. That is why I say both sides wish to enforce their beliefs on society; it is not simply a case of people complaining when restrictions are lifted.
Here @Babale confirms that that is indeed what he wants:
IMHO if we are going to live together, then it is essential to be tolerant of different beliefs. What’s the alternative? Civil war?
You’re projecting conservative values on liberals. Liberals are not interested in “owning” conservatives. They don’t care what happens unless you act on something. Even then they will give you a lot of leeway. In fact liberals are more concerned with “not insulting” conservatives than many real pivotal issues. But that does not work the other way around. It’s asymmetrical.
The whining and griping about “They hate us” you can hear it all over RW media. This is code for “We hate them. Start manically projecting”
Yeah, if you hold bigoted beliefs but you keep them to yourselves, or even use them to make your family miserable (ie you are pissed off at your daughter because she married a black woman) but don’t project it outwards, I don’t think there’s anything society can or should do about that. However, if you’re that person and you’re whining because people like you are now the bad guys in TV shows while interracial same sex couples are more represented, that’s too bad, so sad.
No, you don’t get it. It’s important for the majority to tolerate different ideas, different beliefs, and people advocating for these, even if they find them repellent or immoral. That does not mean agreeing to allow practices that harm other people.
And yes, unlimited tolerance is a bad idea, but that doesn’t mean you don’t tolerate anyone whose ideas you dislike or find immoral. If you only tolerate people you agree with, that is not tolerance at all (read the slatestarcodex essay.) Here is what Popper actually said (my bold):
Less well known [than other paradoxes Popper discusses] is the paradox of tolerance : Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
The treatment of conservatives (and anyone else who disagrees with the dominant ideology) on this board proves that this is nonsense. The people getting fired or censured merely for speaking up about their beliefs proves it is nonsense. The surveys showing that the majority of Americans today are afraid to say what they believe prove that it is nonsense.
Now public demonstrations ought to be allowed in the public square, even if I disagree with them. The proper response isn’t to demand that participants be arrested, it’s to mount a counterdemonstration, or write to the papers/assorted modern equivalents, or so on. But he wasn’t arrested just for “preaching against gay marriage”; a phrasing which sounds to me as if they’d marched into his church and arrested him in the middle of the sermon. He was arrested, in effect, for disturbing the peace (“under Section 5 of Britain’s Public Order Act because it caused alarm and distress”); the charge was determined to be unfounded, and he was released and is back at it.
Whether in my opinion (which very likely differs from UK law) he was reasonably demonstrating, or was unreasonably disturbing the peace, would depend on what exactly he said; which isn’t clear to me. He says he never said anything against or targeting other homosexuals. He was reported as having been abusive and insulting. If he was “preaching against gay marriage” I don’t see how he could have done that without saying anything against gay marriage partners; but neither story I found gives a text of what wording he used; and I don’t know whether either the people who arrested him, or the ones who released him, were going by evidence of what he actually said.
Coming back to this:
Not clear what you mean by “deserving of abuse”, there. But as pretty much everybody in this society has for many years been expected to live with others who publicly preach that they’re going to hell (yes, everybody. There are multiple such sects, some of which say that everyone not a member of their particular sect will go to hell. So even being a member of one of them means people still have others saying this about them): why can’t the people so preaching manage to live with being called bigots? It doesn’t actually seem half as bad to me to be called a bigot as to be told that one’s going to be deservedly tortured for all eternity. Yet it’s generally supposed to be taken for granted that the latter is perfectly normal, and nobody ought to complain about it.
I could make an argument that having to listen over and over, in places that you have to go to otherwise, to somebody preaching that your marriage is sinful and you and your loved one are going to burn in hell, is harmful; even when you don’t believe a word of it.
I interact all the time, routinely and cheerfully, with people who probably do believe I’m going to hell (though not for that particular reason, at least unless they think everybody nonconforming must be gay.) But, whatever they say in their living rooms or their churches, they don’t feel the need to tell me about it. And I don’t feel the need to tell them what I think of parts (not all) of their religions. And we can organize and run the farmers’ market together, for the good of all of us and of our customers – all of whom everybody is serving without asking who they’re married to, or publicly lecturing on the subject.
Americans believe in all sorts of shit that isn’t true. Over half of 'em believe in ghosts. Should we have a conversation now about whether ghost busting is a legitimate function of government, and if so, is it best handled at the state or federal level?
But this is literally what GIGOBuster does in every thread including earlier in this one - characterize an argument (“specialized school programs should use objective tests to determine admission”) as “conservative,” bring up some other unrelated “conservative” position (antivax), then yell at the person making the argument about schools for being an anti-vax conservative.
To a less explicit degree, the people in the board in-crowd blurring the lines between “anything I don’t agree with” and “conservative” and then unloading on some characteristic of “conservatives” of no relevance to what anyone previously posted in the thread goes on all the time.
I’ve never seen anyone from the leftist wing call out one of their own for the illogical, trollish nature of this behavior.
Leftists seem extremely eager to tolerate intolerance of Asians succeeding at school, Jews not being blown up, and Muslims practicing their religion in Syria and China.
Everyone wants to quote Popper when it’s time to not tolerate things their opponents believe. Nobody wants to examine their own side’s moral shortcomings or acknowledge that Popper was just as much talking about communists as fascists in his quote.
I wish Discourse would let me post JUST an eye-roll emoji, but it unfortunately does not. So that means that I have to go to a lot more effort to post an eye-roll in response to your constant, never-ending stream of “WOKE LEFTISTS ARE INFILTRATING THE SCHOOLS!” screeds.
