How Much Should We Tolerate?

John Hawkins | Dec 27, 2014

Here’s a message that’s almost never said that our country desperately needs to hear: Americans need to be a lot less tolerant.

One of the most ironclad laws of life on Planet Earth is that you get more of what you reward and less of what you punish. If our goal were to encourage the destruction of our entire society, would what we celebrate and punish culturally be much different?

Maybe it would be a LITTLE different. Movies like the Passion of the Christ and its inferior cousin, Exodus: Gods and Kings, wouldn’t be made. There wouldn’t be anybody celebrating the military and shows like Duck Dynasty wouldn’t be allowed, but most of what we celebrate culturally these days wouldn’t need to change at all. If the whole country bought into the values being pushed by most of Hollywood, MSNBC and on Lena Dunham’s twitter account, we’d be a banana republic before Chelsea Clinton could take on Jenna Bush for the presidency in 2040.

That hasn’t always been the case. There was a time when American culture trumpeted the values that made us successful, which most assuredly were not tolerance, diversity and being nice to each other. Not that any of those values are bad. Let me repeat that: NOT THAT ANY OF THOSE VALUES ARE BAD, but they’re also not very important in the scheme of things either. You can exemplify all of those values and still be a completely immoral, lazy weirdo whose existence is a drag on the rest of society.

Yet, we don’t want to say that because it has been hammered into us that it’s so essential to be “tolerant.” When I think of tolerance on a society-wide level, a story Mark Steyn once wrote about always comes to mind.

“Once upon a time we knew what to do. A British district officer, coming upon a scene of suttee, was told by the locals that in Hindu culture it was the custom to cremate a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre. He replied that in British culture it was the custom to hang chaps who did that sort of thing. There are many great things about India — curry, pyjamas, sitars, software engineers — but suttee was not one of them. What a pity we’re no longer capable of being 'judgmental' and 'discriminating.'"

How many people are there who wouldn’t want their kids on drugs, who wouldn’t want anyone on drugs living in their neighborhood, who wouldn’t hire someone who regularly uses drugs – but are okay with drug legalization and are cheerleading marijuana legalization in Colorado because of tolerance?

View full article at Townhall.com