Who values tolerance?

Let’s Hear It For The Boy!

Guest post by Suzann Darnall

Maybe I am just a hopeless, out-of-touch, old-fashioned woman, but I like men. Men who are masculine. Men who enjoy sports. Men who like guns. Men who collect tools. Men who make me feel protected and cherished. Men who treat me like I am a treasure. Men who are like my grandfathers, my father, and my husband.

As a woman who likes men, I am saddened by the current attacks on men and boys. Men are being attacked on all fronts. Boys are being treated like they are defective. Such boys will never learn that they are truly special. Boys who do not fit the beta-mold of political correctness are being punished for being what used to be considered healthy, active, and normal.

Feminism, de-masculation, childhood-drag-queens, and other such attendant "movements" are about destroying men and boys as we know them. It is as if the Progressives want to eliminate the human race by making it impossible for procreation. Divide the sexes and there can be no more babies. Oh, and, if some babies happen to come about, Planned Parenthood will just offer abortions and get those taken care of right away.

This ultimately becomes attacks on families. Family is the basis for God's plan of happiness and the building block to a functioning society. Healthy families make good communities. Good communities make strong nations. And, Satan does not want strong nations. He wants humanity in disarray and vulnerable. Hence his use of minions to push for globalism to destroy nations and his use of the war on gender, particularly against males, to destroy families.

Well, I hope and pray we can curb this all-out-assault on our boys and men. We must cherish and support the men in our families and communities. Especially those considered dangerous by the Progressives. You know, those with the “toxic masculinity”. The guys who don’t dress like girls or wannabe girls. The boys who are athletes and mow lawns. The men who work as military or first responders.

I am not saying there is anything wrong with the boys and men who make alternate lifestyle choices. I am just saying the other guys deserve the same tolerance. Let’s hear it for the men and boys that are masculine. The guys that make us think of John Wayne and football, while we dream of prom nights and weddings.

“What are little boys made of? Snips and snails And puppy-dogs' tails That's what little boys are made of.”
There is nothing wrong with little boys getting dirty and playing outside. Building forts and fighting imaginary foes. These boys become the farmers and soldiers and architects that move our society forward. So, let’s hear it for the boys who will be boys!!! Let’s celebrate the men they become. Let’s decriminalize being male and masculine. Let’s be tolerant.

Have you silenced yourself because you don't want to suffer the intolerance of the outrage mob?

What is the definition of tolerance? Dave Rubin has some experiences to share.

An atheist's step too far, Sex Au Naturel

Andrew Klavan's opening monolog is as witty as usual. It includes many comments on the national news of the day.

A Berkeley radio or t.v station has canceled an interview with atheist Richard Dawkins, because he said something that offended Muslims. Dawkins has been saying offensive things about Christians for years, but that wasn't a reason for the Berkley station to avoid setting up an interview with him.

Andrew says, "What could be more tolerant than to be tolerant of complete intolerance?"

Andrew interviews the author of Sex Au Naturel, Patrick Coffin. Patrick is a Catholic who has a talk show.

Helping the body tolerate infections

Usha Lee McFarling writes at Scientific American about one physiologist who wants us to stop worrying so much about fighting infections and instead help the body tolerate them. Her name is Janelle Ayres.

An associate professor at the Salk Institute in the heart of San Diego’s booming biotech beach, Ayres is harnessing all manner of high-tech tools from the fields of microbiomics, genetics, and immunology—and looking to a menagerie of animals—to sort out why some individuals tolerate infection so much better than others....They went on to propose that the immune response to pathogens wasn’t the whole story, and that tolerance—a body’s ability to minimize damage while infected—may play a key role as well. Ayres has since gone on to call what she studies the “tolerance defense system.”

...In fact, it was a 19th-century paper on plants that remained healthy despite being infected with leaf rust that helped inform Ayre’s thinking on tolerance. “It had never been looked at in animals, never described in animals,” she said, speaking with her characteristic rapid-fire enthusiasm. “That’s why you should always read papers outside your bubble.”
(She’s also fascinated with Typhoid Mary, the chef who sickened dozens and killed three in the early 1900s in New York, but somehow tolerated her own infection.)

...Society needs drugs that don’t target bacteria, which can so quickly evolve to evade our best medicines, she argues.

Instead, she thinks we can harness those bacteria—even the ones normally classified as pathogens— to make new drugs that save lives by targeting an infected person’s tissues and organs. That would be an entirely new class of therapeutics, which could lessen our dependence on antibiotics and help save lives in cases, like her father’s, where antibiotics fail.

Read more here.

Least tolerant

Bre Payton reports at The Federalist,

A new survey of students at Dartmouth College found that those who identified as Democrats are the least tolerant on campus.

Read more here.

“unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes at the Hoover Institute,

...political Islam implies a constitutional order fundamentally incompatible with the US Constitution and with the “constitution of liberty” that is the foundation of the American way of life.

...The conflict between the United States and political Islam in modern times dates back to at least 1979, when the US embassy in Tehran was seized by Islamic revolutionaries and fifty-two Americans were held hostage for 444 days. In the decades that followed, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania reminded Americans of the threat posed by political Islam. But it was not until the 9/11 attacks that political Islam as an ideology attracted sustained public attention. The September 11, 2001, attacks were inspired by a political ideology that has its foundation in Islam, specifically its formative period in Medina.

Since 9/11, at least $1.7 trillion has been spent on combat and reconstruction costs in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The total budgetary cost of the wars and homeland security from 2001 through 2016 is more than $3.6 trillion. Yet in spite of the sacrifices of more than 5,000 armed service personnel who have lost their lives since 9/11 and the tens of thousands of American soldiers who have been wounded, today political Islam is on the rise around the world. Violence is the most obvious—but not the only—manifestation of this trend. Jihadist groups have proliferated all over the Middle East and North Africa, especially where states are weak and civil wars rage (Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and Syria, not forgetting northern Nigeria). Islam-inspired terrorists also have a global reach. France is in a permanent state of emergency, while the United States has been profoundly shaken by terror attacks in Boston (the Marathon bombers); Fort Hood, Texas; San Bernardino, California; Orlando, Florida; and Ohio State University, to name but a few.

Of the last sixteen years, the worst year for terrorism was 2014, with ninety-three countries experiencing attacks and 32,765 people killed. The second worst was 2015, with 29,376 deaths. Last year, four radical Islamic groups were responsible for 74 percent of all deaths from terrorism: the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), Boko Haram, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda. Although the Muslim world itself bears the heaviest burden of jihadist violence, the West is increasingly under attack.

How large is the jihadist movement in the world? In Pakistan alone, where the population is almost entirely Muslim, 13 percent of Muslims surveyed—more than 20 million people—said that bombings and other forms of violence against civilian targets are often or sometimes justified in order to defend Islam from its enemies.

Disturbingly, the number of Western-born Muslim jihadists is sharply increasing. The United Nations estimated in November 2014 that some 15,000 foreign fighters from at least eighty nations have traveled to Syria to join the radical jihadists. Roughly a quarter of them come from Western Europe.

...From 9/11 until now, the dominant Western response to political Islam has been to focus only on “terror” and “violent extremism.” This approach has failed. In focusing only on acts of violence, we have ignored the ideology that justifies, promotes, celebrates, and encourages those acts. By not fighting a war of ideas against political Islam (or “Islamism”) as an ideology and against those who spread that ideology, we have made a grave error.

If Islamism is the ideology, then dawa encompasses all the methods by which it is spread. The term “dawa” refers to activities carried out by Islamists to win adherents and enlist them in a campaign to impose sharia law on all societies. Dawa is not the Islamic equivalent of religious proselytizing, although it is often disguised as such by blending humanitarian activities with subversive political activities.

The ultimate goal of dawa is to destroy the political institutions of a free society and replace them with strict sharia. Islamists rely on both violent and nonviolent means to achieve their objectives.

Dawa is to the Islamists of today what the “long march through the institutions” was to twentieth-century Marxists. It is subversion from within, the use of religious freedom in order to undermine that very freedom. After Islamists gain power, dawa is to them what Gleichschaltung  (synchronization) of all aspects of German state, civil, and social institutions was to the National Socialists.

There are of course differences. The biggest difference is that dawa is rooted in the Islamic practice of attempting to convert non-Muslims to accept the message of Islam. As it is an ostensibly religious missionary activity, proponents of dawa enjoy a much greater protection by the law in free societies than Marxists or fascists did in the past.

The global infrastructure of dawa is well funded, persistent, and resilient. From 1973 through 2002, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia spent an estimated $87 billion to promote dawa efforts abroad. Josh Martin estimates that, since the early 1970s, Middle Eastern charities have distributed $110 billion, $40 billion of which found its way to sub-Saharan Africa and contributed heavily to Islamist ideological indoctrination there. Nongovernmental organizations in Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia continue to distribute large sums overseas to finance ideological indoctrination and activities. Powerful foundations such as the Qatar Foundation continue to grant financial support and legitimacy to radical Islamic ideology around the world.

Many Islamic charitable foundations use zakat (mandatory charity) funds to mix humanitarian outreach with ideological indoctrination, laying the ground for future intolerance, misogyny, and jihad, even if no violence is used in the short term. When informal funding mechanisms are included, the zakat funds available could reach “hundreds of billions of dollars” worldwide each year.

...To resist the insidious advance of political Islam, we need to develop a strategy to counter not only those who use violence to advance their politico-religious objectives—the jihadists—but also the great and complex ideological infrastructure known as dawa, just as we countered both the Red Army and the ideology of communism in the Cold War. Focusing only on “terror” as a tactic is insufficient. We ignore at our peril the ideological infrastructure that supports political Islam in both its violent and its nonviolent forms.

It is not just that jihad is an extension of dawa; according to some observers, it is dawa by other means. Put differently, nonviolent and violent Islamists differ only on tactics; they share the same goal, which is to establish an unfree society ruled by strict sharia law. Institutionally, nonviolent Islamists have benefited from terror attacks committed by jihadists because such attacks make nonviolent Islamists appear moderate in the eyes of Western governments, even when their goals and values are not.

...While recognizing that our freedoms are sacrosanct, we must also remember the wise words of Karl Popper, who memorably identified what he called “the paradox of tolerance,” namely that “unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance.”

Read more here.

Tolerance!

"Religious tolerance" specialists

Groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center are esperts at using wonderful-sounding words like tolerance, while practicing thugish, totalitarian behaviors. Bookworm writes,

Christians as a whole, whether they belong to big churches or small ones, do not embrace or practice terrorism to achieve their political or religious goals.

Muslims, by contrast, routinely practice terrorism to achieve goals that are simultaneously religious and political, owing to Islam’s fusion of God and state. Even though it’s remarkably simple to tie Islam to terrorism (9/11, the underwear bomber, the Fort Hood shooter, the attempted Portland Christmas tree massacre, the Boston Marathon bombing), Leftists scurry around like cockroaches exposed to the light in their desperate attempt to avoid acknowledging Islam’s violent heart.

...modern Christianity and genuine Judaism (as opposed to the hard Leftism that masquerades as “reform Judaism”) are the most humane, civilizing forces the world has ever seen. With their focus on justice and grace, they rid the world of slavery, ended child labor, advanced women’s status and, in Israel’s case, fought a 60-year war without sinking to the level of her enemies. But the Left truly hates them and seeks to undermine them at every turn.

...the military has brought in Michael Weinstein, Esq., a “religious tolerance” specialist and the man who founded the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (“MRFF”). Michael knows all about tolerance. Or at least, he knows all about tolerance in the Obama era. To Michael (or “Mikey” as he likes to be known), a good way to express tolerance is to call Christians “monsters” or, even better “bloody monsters.”

What inspired Weinstein’s apopletic rage is the fact that conservatives took offense when the military piggy-backed on a delusional Southern Poverty Law Center screed and identified conservative Christians as the greatest terrorist threat in America.

Even worse than the applause he’s getting from the mainstream Left is the fact that he’s been taken on by the Pentagon as a consultant to help develop new policies on religious tolerance in the military. These new policies will include rules for court-martialing military chaplains who use the Christian gospel when they counsel the American troops under their care.

...The problem is that it’s not Christians committing the crimes he imagines. The major terrorist crimes come from the Islamists, something that Mike and his friends on the Left refuse to acknowledge.

Speaking of committed, though, in a sane world Mikey’s delusions would have him being checked out by psychiatrists as a clear and present danger. In our insane world, psychiatrists are used to disarm our veterans and the delusional, hate-filled, spittle-flecked Mikey gets to work with the Pentagon to create a tolerance policy that ensures that military chaplains will be court martialed for doing their jobs.

As for me, I think that people who are willing to fight and die for their country in a constitutionally-bound military run by civilians, in a nation controlled by the First Amendment, should be allowed to practice their religion without Leftists denying them the comfort of knowing that, as they go into battle, God walks at their side.

Read more here.

Are the young adults today intolerant?

April Kelly-Woessner writes about tolerance in mindingthecampus.org. Do you believe we

have a social responsibility to be intolerant towards those who would promote racism, sexism and homophobia?

...For example, in an op-ed in the Harvard Crimson last year, a student argues for “academic justice” to replace academic freedom.

...Yes, the kids are intolerant. That is, they are intolerant if we define tolerance as researchers have for the past six decades, as a measure of willingness to extend basic democratic rights to those one finds most objectionable.

Read more here.

This is a subject I often think about. For example, I regularly read (and excerpt here) a blog called Chateau Heartiste. It is racist to the core. It also is provocatively well written. Most of all, CH seems to have a real insight into the sexes. Since that is something I need, I read the blog, ignoring the stupid racism that regularly pops up.

Defending the root of our freedom

Dr. Ben Carson posted this Easter message on his Facebook page:

As Easter approaches, let us remember the role that Jesus Christ and God play in our lives. Let us also remember that Jews, Christians and Muslims all believe in God, and while there are ideological differences in who Jesus was, we should find peace in the fact that we are all God’s children. Jesus is my role model, and he preached love, he preached acceptance. He also was a man of values and principles, and he ended up being crucified for it. But, he rose again to advocate godly principles of loving our fellow man, caring about our neighbors, developing our God-given talents to the utmost so that we become valuable to the people around us, and maintaining high ideals that govern our lives. We must make certain that people of all types of faith are respected by one another. Let us remember that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution is one of the basic pillars of our system of governance and a founding principle of our nation, as it protects religious freedom. It is critical that we allow Americans to practice their religious ways, while also ensuring that no one’s beliefs infringe upon those of others.

Throughout the globe we must serve as champions of freedom of religion. As people across the world are persecuted by religious fanatics who perform hateful acts of ignorance, we Americans have a duty to denounce these acts of persecution. By standing up to such intolerance, we are defending the root of our freedom. I enjoy the following quote from the second Chronicles 7:14, “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves and pray, and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sins and will heal their land.”

A publication called the Iowa Statesman had this to say about Carson's message:

Rather than the feel-good statement he likely envisioned he was sending out, Dr. Carson has instead stepped on a political landmine. The comment received thousands of likes and shares, but also received thousands of comments. In Iowa, grassroots Christian conservatives — a key caucus demographic he has attempted to attract — rebuked the statement in droves.

Carson has already had to “clarify” comments deemed critical of the Second Amendment. Expect another “clarification” soon.

I don't see a thing wrong with Carson's statement. Do you?

In defense of religious liberty and tolerance, while condemning discrimination

Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina and Mike Huckabee had some important things to say about Indiana's defense of religious liberty. Breitbart has quotes from Fiorina and Huckabee here, and a brief video of Cruz.

On being more considerate and tolerant than everybody else

Frank J. Fleming asks,

...does anyone care about women anymore? It’s kind of passé to combat gender bias. Plus, are genders even real? Aren’t they just a social construct or something? Then again, if that’s true, I’m not sure where babies come from… but we’re not talking about science; we’re talking about tolerance.

Read why Frank is patting himself on the back here.

Mark Steyn on the Age of Tolerance

Mark Stein is in a conflict with his editor at National Review. Stein wrote this weekend about the Duck Dynasty controversy,

What GLAAD is attempting would be called, were it applied to any other identity group, “cultural appropriation.”

In the broader sense, it’s totalitarian. While American gays were stuffing and mounting the duck hunter in their trophy room, the Prince of Wales was celebrating Advent with Christian refugees from the Middle East, and noting that the land in which Christ and Christianity were born is now the region boasting “the lowest concentration of Christians in the world — just four percent of the population.” It will be three, and two, and one percent soon enough, for there is a totalitarian impulse in resurgent Islam — and not just in Araby. A few miles from Buckingham Palace, Muslims in London’s East End are now sufficiently confident to go around warning local shopkeepers to cease selling alcohol. In theory, you might still enjoy the right to sell beer in Tower Hamlets or be a practicing Christian in Iraq, but in reality not so much.

It is not enough to have gay marriage for gays. Everything must be gayed. There must be Five-Year Gay Plans for American bakeries, and the Christian church, and reality TV. There must be shock brigades of gay duck-hunters honking out the party line deep in the backwoods of the proletariat. Obamacare pajama models, if not yet mandatorily gay, can only be dressed in tartan onesies and accessorized with hot chocolate so as to communicate to the Republic’s maidenhood what a thankless endeavor heterosexuality is in contemporary America.

Here are two jokes one can no longer tell on American television. But you can still find them in the archives, out on the edge of town, in Sub-Basement Level 12 of the ever-expanding Smithsonian Mausoleum of the Unsayable. First, Bob Hope, touring the world in the year or so after the passage of the 1975 Consenting Adult Sex Bill:

“I’ve just flown in from California, where they’ve made homosexuality legal. I thought I’d get out before they make it compulsory.” Advertisement For Hope, this was an oddly profound gag, discerning even at the dawn of the Age of Tolerance that there was something inherently coercive about the enterprise. Soon it would be insufficient merely to be “tolerant” — warily accepting, blithely indifferent, mildly amused, tepidly supportive, according to taste. The forces of “tolerance” would become intolerant of anything less than full-blown celebratory approval.

Second joke from the archives: Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra kept this one in the act for a quarter-century. On stage, Dino used to have a bit of business where he’d refill his tumbler and ask Frank, “How do you make a fruit cordial?” And Sinatra would respond, “I dunno. How do you make a fruit cordial?” And Dean would say, “Be nice to him.”

But no matter how nice you are, it’s never enough. Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson, in his career-detonating interview with GQ, gave a rather thoughtful vernacular exegesis of the Bible’s line on sin, while carefully insisting that he and other Christians are obligated to love all sinners and leave it to the Almighty to adjudicate the competing charms of drunkards, fornicators, and homosexuals. Nevertheless, GLAAD — “the gatekeepers of politically correct gayness” as the (gay) novelist Bret Easton Ellis sneered — saw their opportunity and seized it. By taking out TV’s leading cable star, they would teach an important lesson pour encourager les autres — that espousing conventional Christian morality, even off-air, is incompatible with American celebrity.

Steyn's editor, Mr. Steort scolded,

By way of criticizing speech, I’ll say that I found the derogatory language in this column, and especially the slur in its borrowed concluding joke, both puerile in its own right and disappointing coming from a writer of such talent.

To which Steyn responded with a challenge,

It is a matter of some regret to me that my own editor at this publication does not regard this sort of thing as creepy and repellent rather than part of the vibrant tapestry of what he calls an “awakening to a greater civility”. I’m not inclined to euphemize intimidation and bullying as a lively exchange of ideas – “the use of speech to criticize other speech”, as Mr Steorts absurdly dignifies it. So do excuse me if I skip to the men’s room during his patronizing disquisition on the distinction between “state coercion” and “cultural coercion”. I’m well aware of that, thank you. In the early days of my free-speech battles in Canada, my friend Ezra Levant used a particular word to me: “de-normalize”. Our enemies didn’t particularly care whether they won in court. Whatever the verdict, they’d succeed in “de-normalizing” us — that’s to say, putting us beyond the pale of polite society and mainstream culture. “De-normalizing” is the business GLAAD and the other enforcers are in. You’ll recall Paula Deen’s accuser eventually lost in court — but the verdict came too late for Ms Deen’s book deal, and TV show, and endorsement contracts.

I am sorry my editor at NR does not grasp the stakes. Indeed, he seems inclined to “normalize” what GLAAD is doing. But, if he truly finds my “derogatory language” offensive, I’d rather he just indefinitely suspend me than twist himself into a soggy pretzel of ambivalent inertia trying to avoid the central point — that a society where lives are ruined over an aside because some identity-group don decides it must be so is ugly and profoundly illiberal. As to his kind but belated and conditional pledge to join me on the barricades, I had enough of that level of passionate support up in Canada to know that, when the call to arms comes, there will always be some “derogatory” or “puerile” expression that it will be more important to tut over. So thanks for the offer, but I don’t think you’d be much use, would you?

How dumb do you have to be to scold Mark Steyn, and not expect a devastating reply?