I have come to the conclusion that the rank and file of the conservative movement is absolutely nuts. Now, I mean that with all due respect. Conveniently there is not much respect due to them. The reason I am writing this is because I have been struggling with my worldview over the last couple weeks. It's not about what I believe so much as how I believe it. That is to say that I have always believed that you should respect everyone's point of view no matter how ridiculous you feel their ideas are. I am not sure if I believe that anymore.
Last Sunday there was an article about the son of the Mullah James Dobson. It appears that Mullah Jr. is coming to my town to promote his book. The premise of the book is that tolerance is dumb. Some ideas are so stupid that being intolerant of them is the right thing to do. Somehow I doubt that he has intelligent design in mind but from my perspective it is a perfect example.
So my struggle is that sometimes I feel the same way. Sometimes I feel as though my need to be tolerant of other viewpoints is nothing more than an unfortunate side effect of my liberal guilt. This is helped along by the fact that I seem to hear a lot more conservatives trying to argue that liberals need to be tolerant of other viewpoints (their arguments generally accompany attempts to suppress liberal ideas, David Horowitz I'm looking in your direction). I don't like feeling that way. In fact I hate feeling that way. I like to think of myself as someone who is driven by observing reality and coming to conclusions based on those observations. I despise people who are driven by ideology. And I believe that being driven against one ideology is just as bad as being driven by an ideology at the expense of all others.
Then I hear someone say something truly crazy! I mean something that transcends crazy. Crazy seems like Socrates when compared to what I heard on Thursday morning. I was going through my normal morning routine with Washington Journal on in the background. The topic was James Sensenbrenner's crazy idea to send people to prison for obscenity. That's when I heard this woman:
crazy lady goes crazy
Just for a good laugh here is the best part of the above clip:
Jail Time or what?
The woman in the clip was from Atlanta, Georgia. The really scary part is the fact that she is a teacher. What really got me thinking about this was the contrast between her statements and those of the caller that followed her. He was from Connecticut and made some very rational comments. It was a perfect illustration of the difference between being liberal and being conservative and how people of those philosophies view the world.
crazy lady with rational guy's response
On the one hand you have an insane woman ranting about how she prefers movies from the fifties (there was no sex or violence in the movies back then). On the other hand you have a guy saying some perfectly logical things about how one should handle media content they don't like. How can it possibly be that we have to be tolerant of their views? I'm not saying that there is no room for debate. In fact there are quite few conservatives that I find to be very interesting even if I don't agree with them. But there is a particular brand of crazy that has become unacceptable. I think the woman in the clip above illustrates this perfectly. Our rights are being threatened and we can't let our need to be tolerant get in the way of protecting those rights.
