Test 3 03/10/2011

• After Westboro: The Trouble With “Tolerance” | Sexuality/Gender | Religion Dispatches

  tags: westboro theology blogs LGBT

  • Indeed, toleration is no gift to the tolerated.

  • (As an aside, it doesn’t help one’s case for tolerance to place the word “biblical” in front of it. My immediate question upon reading Chambers’ statement is, “Just what part of the biblical canon is one appealing to when making a case for ‘biblical’ tolerance?” Potential answers could be categorized according to gradations of frightening.)

  • If our goal is to practice tolerance, then we have given up on a quest for a more radical acceptance and embrace of difference and Otherness. Tolerance assumes that the hierarchical theological constructions we hold are “natural” and that the binary ways that we construct the group we call “us” and the groups we call “them” have some basis in reality. Tolerance allows our unearned privilege (whether racial privilege, class privilege, heterosexist privilege, etc.) to go unquestioned and unchallenged.
  • Michel Foucault called this type of power “discourse.” The term “discourse” describes the stories we as a society tell about ourselves and the world, from what perspective we tell them, with what authority, and in support of whose way of being in the world. Discourse describes whose stories get told in public and whose do not. Discourse is the way we define reality. And those stories, perspectives, and ways of being that fall outside of the constructed “norm” are subjugated to the dominant discourse. Narratives that challenge the norm are silenced.
  • the discursive power of the dominant descriptions of reality inevitably overshadows dissenting voices and narratives that challenge the status quo.
  • As much as we enjoy free speech and should strive to protect it, we cannot be lulled into believing that simply because everyone has the right to speak that all voices can be heard. On the religious landscape, when those loudest among us are of the Westboro ilk, and those who are largest among us are silenced by comfortable, tolerant notions of welcome without affirmation—indeed, a resolve to say nothing at all—what voices are left to tilt the discursive scales toward greater embrace and inclusion for LGBT people?

  • The fear of letting go of “tolerance” as an ideal may rest in the assumption that the opposite of tolerance is radical hatred and violence. Yet, radical hatred and violence—like that of Westboro and perpetrators of hate crimes—is never countered by tolerance but instead by radical acceptance and embrace.

  • In order for tolerance to no longer make sense to us as an appropriate theological category, we must question our hierarchical theologies that position some above others and bestow upon a small group the ability to hold tolerance, rather than radical acceptance and embrace, for the masses beneath.
  • We must rupture our theological constructions that call for mere tolerance through the deconstruction of our theological notions that uphold hierarchies and binary divisions between the group we call “us” and all of the rest we call “them.”

• Mark Steel: I know, let's sell weapons to a lunatic - Mark Steel, Commentators - The Independent

  • Because when a dictator tells you he no longer wants destructive weapons, what else can you do but welcome his change of heart, by selling him a desertful of destructive weapons? It's like wandering up to someone at Alcoholics Anonymous and saying: "Congratulations on finally renouncing drink. Now to celebrate let's go and get pissed."

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