America’s Acceptable Bigotry
By Justin N. Poythress - Posted at Time and Chance:
Among the thinning list of vices still capable of generating unilateral outrage, bigotry remains at the top…with one exception. We have good reasons to hate bigotry. It is the judging, excluding, discriminating, and oppressing of a human being made in God’s image based on external differences. The seed of bigotry grows in the soil of hatred and pride, and blooms into some of the basest, most horrific atrocities that human beings commit.Western society’s most laudable moral pivot in the past fifty years (one often glossed over in narratives chronicling our progressive degeneration) has been a burgeoning intolerance for bigotry. We have become adept (often overly so) at sniffing out the aromas of bigotry. This is generally a good thing. We’re willing to listen more. But there is one arena where we are proudly becoming less tolerant. Even as we strive to become better at appreciating diversity among backgrounds and cultures, a cancer of bigotry is growing that rivals our worst historical prejudices—a bigotry against political identity groups.
We might initially dismiss political bigotry as something categorically different. After all, politics are a matter of opinions and values, subject to change, progression, and correction. One’s opinion on political opponents has nothing to do with judging that person’s value or dignity.
If we suspend, for the moment, the challenging complexity of how our values often stem from our background and culture, I might accept political bigotry under those terms as something categorically different from, say, the bigotry of hating Irish people. But today’s political bigotry is precisely not that sort. It does not honor an opponent as respectable and intelligent, while disagreeing over a philosophy of governance.
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