What should be "intolerable"?
by SouthernFriedInfidel | Published on November 20th, 2010, 4:41 pm | Religion
Whenever some group comes under fire for being intolerant of some other group, it's often heard from those who are intolerant "You're being intolerant of US, so you are all hypocrites!"This is a favorite tactic from Christians who want to make life as miserable as possible for gays, Muslims, atheists, scientists, and anyone else that tends to crimp their "lifestyle."
But it occurs to me that we all agree that some things can't be tolerated. Like stealing, or kidnapping for instance. Why is that?
I know religious people would automatically reply "because God ordered us not to tolerate those things." Well, that sort of claim would have to be backed up, and if you look at the history of how "godly" people have acted through history, regardless of religion, you'll see that it's not so.
But even those unruly people refused to tolerate stealing and kidnapping within their own societies. So a theory of how behaviors become forbidden should take into account that such rules are created for the purpose of social stability.
Now we come to consider American society. What is different about American society is that it is not a single social group that has evolved in the usual tribal isolation over its life. Instead, it is a collection of people from many societies that have come together and lived here for a mere 10 or 15 generations at most. Such a society must make its rules differently from the old "trial-and-error, then make it look like god told us to live this way" method. And we have done that with a secular government that finds the common ground (ideally) for its laws.
But society never stays unchanging, which ticks off the folks who are used to getting their social rules out of ancient books, and pretending that those rules should never change. Which brings us to today's intolerances from the religious conservatives.
In America, we had a long period of tolerating slavery, and a lot of religious folks didn't like it one bit when the rest of the civilized world decided to change that tolerance. We ended up fighting a war over that question. A lot of religious folks didn't like it when women wanted the right to vote. There was a long hard fight over that, but the conservatives lost that fight as well. Then came racial integration, in schools and the military, and guess who were in the front of THAT resistance. Religious conservatives. And don't forget the whole business of "interracial" marriage. There are STILL religious folks who will pull out their Bibles to find reasons to fight against that.
The point is that in all these social changes that took place, social stability was NOT disrupted by those steps in our evolution. Yet there were religious folks who fought as hard as they could to remain intolerant... and the world eventually ended up passing them by.
I expect that eventually -- soon, I hope -- this business of being intolerant toward gay people will run the same course. We already see in many places around the world that gays in the military, getting married and raising families of their own pose NO THREAT to social stability. There is no real-world reason to remain intolerant of gays or keep them from the same rights that straight folks have. The only reason left is found in some books that tell their readers to tolerate slavery, keep women ignorant and servile, and keep societies as narrow-minded and tribal as possible.
Tolerating useless intolerance is not helpful to any modern, growing society. One day, the world needs to learn that very important lesson.
