The tyranny of Leftist 'tolerance'

To anyone focused on real-world events and relationships, America is obviously the most tolerant and inclusive society that has ever existed. If you are looking for irrefutable evidence, watch an hour of TV commercials created by major U.S. companies. Racially integrated couples, gay couples and families, multi-racial professionals and creators are featured on virtually every one. This would hardly be the case if anti-Black and anti-gay sentiments were perceived by corporate advertisers to pose a significant threat to their sales. The same is true of television programming generally, where series featuring little people, obese people, and every mix of gay couples, non-white and non-straight TV hosts and commentators, are ubiquitous all day long. Yet the political left and the Democratic Party still refuse to take yes for an answer and prefer instead to focus on fringe and marginalized bigots who come in all colors, genders and sexual orientations, and will be with us to the end of time.

In fact, through a perverse but also inevitable twist to identity politics, the most aggressively bigoted and hate-filled censors seeking to suppress and marginalize individuals whom they regard as “other” are the very movements organized as advocates for “victim” minorities. The haters include white supremacist fringe movements who think that through attacks on Jews and blacks they are actually defending whites (who are indeed targeted by so-called social justice warriors. But the most prominent and far more numerous hate groups are the social justice warriors themselves — Black Lives Matter, the misnamed Human Rights Campaign and the equally misnamed Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), an organization that is well-practiced in the art of defamation against what it refers to as “oppressor” groups.

Vice President Mike Pence and Trump’s gay ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, are leading a Trump-inspired global campaign to end the criminalization of gay sex and gay relationships, but you would never know it from the hate that gay “civil rights” groups are directing at them. Pence has been singled out by leading Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg as a dangerous bigot — not because he actually is a bigot but because he holds traditional Christian views of gay marriage, which offend Buttigieg and the gay vigilantes. When Buttigieg announced he was gay and introduced his husband in 2015, Pence went out of his way as the governor of Indiana – as Buttigieg’s political rival — to praise him for his public service as mayor of South Bend.

Being able to hold opinions that others find offensive is called freedom of conscience or religious liberty, and is the most basic freedom we have as Americans, which is why it is stipulated in the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights. It is the most basic freedom because without the ability to hold dissenting opinions and express them freely you can’t defend any of the other freedoms you have. The sin committed by Vice President Pence that gave Buttigieg the license to demonize and defame him was his signing of a bill to protect the religious liberty of the people of Indiana. The presumption behind Buttigieg’s slander of Pence was his membership in a group purportedly “marginalized” and therefore “oppressed.” In fact, in the present political climate, even in Indiana, Buttigieg’s homosexuality is an obvious asset – one so powerful as to catapult an obscure mayor of a crime-ridden small town to third or fourth place in the race to become the Democrats’ presidential candidate for 2020.