You're essentially trying to say, "we're tolerant of all views except for those that are morally wrong." There's nothing tolerant about that. If that's your definition of tolerance, then Saudi Arabia and mainland China are tolerant countries - they just have different views of morality.
I never used the word tolerant but on that note, I don't think morally wrong views should be tolerated.
What are morals is the obvious counterpoint and that's fine - I'm not arguing people should be jailed for it, or physically harmed. I'm saying the worse that should happen to a racist is that they are ignored. We aren't China, in that sense.
Sounds to me that your views could be summed up most closely as "socially liberal, fiscally/economically conservative". This is a viewpoint I see most often among the oft-mocked libertarians.
This is probably the biggest problem with our two-party system: Most people land similarly to you and I, as shown by the specific-issue poll earlier, but neither of the two major parties really fall that way, making people choose based on the issue(s) they deem most important.
>This is probably the biggest problem with our two-party system: Most people land similarly to you and I,
According to most opinion polls I've seen that actually cluster people along these dimensions, about 3% of Americans are "socially liberal, fiscally conservative".
I don't know what your message is meant to be in citing this, but this quote does not at all support rejecting and excluding people who espouse beliefs that one considers morally reprehensible - quite the opposite. From the page you linked:
> In a 1997 work, Michael Walzer asked, "Should we tolerate the intolerant?" He notes that most minority religious groups who are the beneficiaries of tolerance are themselves intolerant, at least in some respects. In a tolerant regime, such people may learn to tolerate, or at least to behave "as if they possessed this virtue"
Substitute "religious group" with "political group", and the same applies. If you ostracize and reject people who hold views you find reprehensible then you're relinquishing your best opportunity to change them. If the surrounding community rejects them, then these rejected people will commiserate with like minded people and probably become more extreme and vengeful of society.
"Intolerant of intolerance" refers just as much to the intolerance for different worldviews and values that we harbor within ourselves as it does to the intolerance we sometimes witness in others.
that's a deceptive semantic conflation (i.e., poor logic; a bad idea). tolerance is for the person, not the idea (e.g., morals). ideas neither need nor deserve "tolerance". many ideas don't even deserve attention, let alone esteem or support.
for example: "i believe that wild bengal tiger will come lick my feet and cough up whole, live bunnies for me to cuddle." bad idea. doesn't deserve any tolerance whatsoever.
people, even those holding poor morals or beliefs, deserve tolerance, because they can change and adopt better morals or beliefs, particularly through experience.
> that's a deceptive semantic conflation (i.e., poor logic; a bad idea). tolerance is for the person, not the idea (e.g., morals). ideas neither need nor deserve "tolerance". many ideas don't even deserve attention, let alone esteem or support.
That's true, but then you need to set up judicable public standards for how to rule on which ideas are good and which are bad. Since most of "liberal" or "free" society is based on refusing to institutionalize morality outside fairly specific civil guidelines, this kind of society is, well, as many people have pointed out, largely incompatible with and unprepared for the challenge of systematically and publicly telling the difference between right and wrong.
it's understandable to want such a commonly-shared standard, but that's not necessary (i'd even contend it's not desirable, for a robust and resiliant society).
we already codify ideas, test them, rank them, and modify or discard them through academic, religious, political, commercial, and social organizations. it's a dynamic system, not a (slowly-built) static one.
"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice". - MLK Jr. (paraphrasing theodore parker apparently, which i just learned =)
