One-sided tolerance
Dear Editor,
After sending my first letter I re-read it and realized that there were many instances where I retorted to the person and not the issue. I have made corrections and hope that my first draft will not make my contribution negligible.
I also neglected to give my webmail address. I apoligize for the moment of stupidity on my part.
It is beyond me, how, a call to return to the ideas of freedom could be considered a diatribe.
Packer isn’t telling people that gentiles are heathens, and I have no idea were that came from. Packer is simply commenting on how tolerance is, in this nation of equality, severely one-sided. Tolerate my lifestyle, but I will not tolerate your beliefs, in fact at many times I will deride and belittle them.
I think it is important here to differentiate tolerance and acceptance. Perhaps that’s where our reverential lamb got off track. For Latter-Day Saints tolerance means to love the sinner, hate the sin, whatever that sin may be. Acceptance would be to love the sinner and the sin. That is what Packer is commenting on, not ethnicity. I have never heard words like tolerance and choice attached to anything that would hinder an international church.
This holy grail of modern American values is exactly what Alexis de Tocqueville feared most in his monumental work Democracy in America. Throughout the work de Tocqueville comments about two passions inherent to democracy, the love of freedom, and the love of equality. Both are good passions when checked by the other but de Tocqueville writes that the love for equality is much stronger than the love of freedom and that if Americans shifted away from smaller democracies (states and townships) to mass democracy (federal government) that the love of freedom would slowly be squelched while the love of equality would thrive and destroy individual thought and reflection.
This battle between freedom and equality began with the Civil War. Yes, we did free the slaves, although this is not the freedom to which de Tocqueville was referring. This was a shift towards more equality. Another win for equality during the Civil War was the move towards a large national/federal government. De Tocqueville fears that mass democracy can lead to a new form of despotism wherein the love of equality all but triumphs.
The attack on Packer is simply another episode in the battle between freedom and equality. Odd though, that what de Tocqueville fears is the end of individuality, those cloaked in political correctness celebrate as intellectual diversity.
Equality and tolerance should be subject to a fair analysis by our dear intellectually diverse friends. These terms do have great value and are some of the characteristics of a well-balanced democratic society. Although to be sure that de Tocqueville’s fear of a new despotism is not realized we cannot afford to turn a blind eye to the love of freedom and the ideological diversity that the love of freedoms insures.
Chelsie Watsonchelsie@cc.usu.edu881-4283