NR’s John Derbyshire, an eminently reasonable and tolerant Episcopalian, is having second thoughts about tolerance itself. With this week’s approval of Canon Robinson, he has realized that the homosexualist lobby is not as willing as he is to leave others a broad sphere of private opinion, but demands approval and aims to silence opposition. In such a situation, truly libertarian tolerance is not possible: one side or the other — the normal or the abnormal — will dominate.
Perhaps our grandfathers were wiser than us. Perhaps there are some things that we, the normal majority, SHOULD, deliberately and consciously, disapprove and marginalize.
My favorite lesbian, the iconoclastic Camille Paglia, was interviewed for three hours on C-SPAN last Sunday, and offered a relevant insight. Although she’s in a ten-year-long relationship, and her partner recently gave birth, she is not a supporter of “same-sex marriage”. Paglia understands that marriage is essentially a religious rite, and as she is an atheist, it does not correspond to her beliefs. She observes that societies that give official sanction to homosexuality through “marriage” are generally decadent, and this worries her, because she wants Western civilization to survive. She argues that the principal civil effects gay people want (the ability to inherit, to be involved in medical decisions, etc.) can be achieved through wills, power-of-attorney agreements, etc., so the clamoring for marriage is unnecessary — and even sometimes hysterical.
Back to Derbyshire: he worries that the same trends wrecking the Episcopal Church are underway in the Catholic Church. He’s right: but Catholics have a reason for hope. Unlike Episcopalians who believe as a matter of course that Church councils can err and have erred — that the official teaching Church is fallible — Catholics believe that the official teaching Church is protected by a gift of the Holy Spirit who keeps her from accepting and embracing error in her doctrines. If this doctrine is true, the Catholic Church will always survive, preaching the Gospel, and the gates of Hell shall not stand against her.
In some ways, the abuse of ‘tolerance’ reminds me of the tyranny of the majority (in an absolute, not representational, democracy). For example, the plebians of Rome voting themselves free food and entertainment while the civil infrastructure rotted. Or the various post-colonial Muslim countries that voted in absolute religious dictatorships.
Tolerance is never a universal virtue. Tolerance of evil is sin – should we have tolerated Hitler and the Nazis? Should we tolerate slavery?
Christian orthodoxy is by its very nature “intolerable” because it endorses the exclusive claims of Jesus Christ. If we are intellectually honest we can embrace the claims of Jesus Christ or we can refute the claims of Jesus Christ, but we cannot simply tolerate the claims of Jesus Christ. We can be hot or cold, but we cannot honestly be lukewarm.