Letter: Equality battle continues

Editor,

In response to a column from Oct. 29, Boyd K. Packer isn’t telling people that “gentiles are heathens,” and I have no idea where 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 they are derided and belittled.

I think it is important here to differentiate tolerance and acceptance. 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 “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 to mass democracy that the love of freedom would slowly be squelched while the love of equality would thrive and destroy individual thought and reflection.

This 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. 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 Watson