William Manchester, in his history “The Glory and the Dream,” said this about America as a free society: “If liberty is to signify anything substantive, it must also be extended to the last limits of the endurable, shielding under its broad tent the genuinely unpopular champions of causes which the majority regards as reprehensible.” Ironic, isn’t it, that a foe of Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin’s appearance at a privately sponsored breakfast launched a Facebook page titled, “Stand on the Side of Tolerance.” This is tolerance? Anyone exercising his/her First Amendment right of free speech, as long as it is exercised without violence or intended to incite violence, is as free today as on Dec. 15, 1791.
I am disturbed that those who shout most loudly for “tolerance” are people whose ideas, if carried to their logical conclusion, would bar others labeled “intolerant” not only from expressing their constitutionally protected views, but from ever holding them in the first place.
Hatred is an abomination to God, but so is this new “tolerance.” Hear the apostle Paul’s words: “Therefore you have no excuse … every one of you who judges another … because you, the judge, practice the very same things” (Romans 2:1).
Don Ebel
Vancouver
