Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Neuhaus's Law: Why a policy of appeasement with the Tolerance Police will never work

The expression "tolerance and diversity" operates the same way within the liberal secularism as the expression "libery, equality, fraternity" operated within the French Revolution: it is a comforting sounding slogan that hides a totalitarian impulse. If the Boy Scouts of America think they can really appease the cultural totalitarians in the PC movement, they are sorely mistaken.

The blog First Thoughts reminds us today of "Neuhaus's Law," which states, "Where orthodoxy is option, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.” As First Thoughts points out, there are already gay activists who are saying that the Boys Scouts proposed policy is not enough.

You can't make cultural treaties with these people. They will break every one of them.

Here is Neuhaus expanding on his maxim:
With the older orthodoxy it is possible to disagree, as in having an argument. Evidence, reason, and logic count, in principle at least. Not so with the new orthodoxy. Here disagreement is an intolerable personal affront. It is construed as a denial of others, of their experience of who they are. It is a blasphemous assault on that most high god, “My Identity.” Truth-as-identity is not appealable beyond the assertion of identity. In this game, identity is trumps.
Read the rest here.
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1 comment:

  1. KyCobb1:33 PM

    The Boy Scouts should've learned their lesson when they ended up having to integrate troops because those uppity blacks weren't satisfied with "separate but equal."

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