aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Monday, April 10, 2006

Intolerance of intolerance can get you sued

Terrance asks, “exactly how does “the right to be christian” include the right to harass gay people?” The LATimes today:

Ruth Malhotra went to court last month for the right to be intolerant.

Malhotra says her Christian faith compels her to speak out against homosexuality. But the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she’s a senior, bans speech that puts down others because of their sexual orientation.

Malhotra sees that as an unacceptable infringement on her right to religious expression. So she’s demanding that Georgia Tech revoke its tolerance policy.

With her lawsuit, the 22-year-old student joins a growing campaign to force public schools, state colleges and private workplaces to eliminate policies protecting gays and lesbians from harassment. The religious right aims to overturn a broad range of common tolerance programs: diversity training that promotes acceptance of gays and lesbians, speech codes that ban harsh words against homosexuality, anti-discrimination policies that require college clubs to open their membership to all.

The Rev. Rick Scarborough, a leading evangelical, frames the movement as the civil rights struggle of the 21st century. “Christians,” he said, “are going to have to take a stand for the right to be Christian.”

LATER: In his post, Terrance also points to this from Jane Smiley in The Huffington Post:

When Christians talk about secular Americans being “tolerant” of Christian beliefs, they are misusing the word. What conservative Christians want is not toleration, but social control. Toleration takes place between two people who know one another, and is a feature of personal relationships. Social control is about who gets the power to dictate policy and law. Christians like Mark Joseph sometimes play the “tolerance” card as a way to present themselves as a disempowered group, but what it is about them that is disempowered is their ability to tell the rest of us what to do. And most of the rules they want us to follow are abstract--rules about how men and women should relate, rules about what families should look like, rules about what people should learn. The program, for Christian conservatives, is not essentially about faith or morality--those are elements in a larger program. The larger program is enforcing conformity…

Secularists...vehemently do not want to be dictated to by religious groups, and they do not want their children to be forced to go to religious schools (school where creationism is taught as science). They are alleged to be “intolerant” of Christians. But the secularists are rarely if ever saying “Do as I do”, they are saying “Leave me alone”. The Christians quite often are not only saying, “Do as I do”, but also “My right is to make you live by my beliefs, and if you resist me, then you are ‘intolerant’.”