intolerance

So Nicholas D. Kristof writes a column in the NYTimes about how liberals should perhaps stop mocking evangelicals and instead realize that they actually share certain goals and could work together on those. Now it seems to me that this advice should be so obvious as to be completely boring. After all, who hasn’t already heard liberals go on about how we need to tolerate each other, see the good in each other, and so on? But, no, Kristof’s blog is immediately deluged with vitriolic comments pointing out the myriad reasons why we should in fact not be tolerant of evangelicals and why they really are a bunch of stupid fascists deserving of all the derision they get.

At least the comments make it clear that Kristof was right when he said at the beginning of the column that liberals make an exception for evangelicals in their tolerance policy. And, as I’ve long said: I’ve lived in a bunch of places in my life and the most ignorant bigots that I ever found in one spot were at Yale, in that bastion of Northeastern learned liberalism. Fortunately, there were exceptions even there.

Sydney