Mary Katherine Ham:
A career journalist and one-time Washington Post editorial board member, Jonathan Capehart explains on MSNBC how tolerance, despite its definition, is actually all about judgmenty judgment and forceful reeducation:
[T]olerance, no, is not – it should not be a two-way street. It’s a one-way street. You cannot say to someone that who you are is wrong, an abomination, is horrible, get a room, and all of those other things that people said about Michael Sam, and not be forced — not forced, but not be made to understand that what you’re saying and what you’re doing is wrong.
I love how he backs off of “forced” for the more genteel Orwellian formulation, “made to understand.” Who’s in charge of making you understand? How many will be made to understand? Just public figures who disagree with Capehart? Employees of important national organizations? Regular old private citizens chatting on the Twitterz? By what mechanism will we be made to understand by Capehart and his peers?
Sports writer William Rhoden offered a refreshing position on this, even though he’s firmly left of center himself. This is the controversial notion Capehart felt he had to push back on:
I think that to deal with things openly there has to be an open back-and-forth dialogue. Tolerance can’t just work one way. You can’t just be one way, that anybody who speaks out… this cannot turn into a Gestapo-type situation where if you express discomfort with something, then you’re cast as a homophobe and you’re fined by the league. I think that there has to be a back-and-forth.
One sided tolerance, where you must be tolerant of one groups position, but they must not tolerate yours, can not even remotely be considered to be equal. Jonathan Capehart is not describing tolerance, he is describing fascism.
Finally, one of them is admitting what we’ve known all along.