Liberals Are So Intolerant!
The Right loves to sling this smug accusation at critics from the Left.
Mark Morford has a reply
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, August 10, 2005


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I get this a lot: Hey Mark, you nefarious and perverted liberal commie
tofu-hugging sex-drunk San Francisco medical experiment gone wrong from
the land of fruits and nuts (or some iteration thereof -- so cute, my
hate mail can be), hey, I notice you love to ridicule those creepy
Christian megachurches and you enjoy spanking wide-eyed Mormons and
tweaking the litigious nipples of the cult of Scientology and you
recoil from toxic Bush policy like a vegetarian recoils from
undercooked veal ...

And I can tell you think Dick Cheney is pretty much the devil in a
defibrillator and that America is so desperately on the wrong track it
might as well be North Korea, and you clearly tend to wince in savage
karmic pain when looking down the rusty barrel of a welfare-happy red
state and I just have one slightly nasty and pointed and cliched
question for you --

Here it is: Where is your supposed progressive openness? Your liberal
generosity of spirit? I thought you Lefties were all mushy and passive
and live-and-let-live?

In other words, where is that famous so-called tolerance I thought all
you libs were supposed to possess like some sort of gentle polyamorous
smiling hug for the world?

To which I reply: You cannot be serious. Does the answer really need to
be articulated? Is it not painfully obvious? Can I have a shot of
Patr=F3n and a long nap before I answer? Here goes ...


You, hate-mailers from the sanctimonious Right and even some of you
morally paralyzed middle-grounders from the Left, are correct. I am, in
fact, deeply intolerant. It is true. I can hide my deep biases and
predispositions no longer.

I cannot, for example, tolerate the dark and violent road down which
this nation seems intent on careening like an Escalade on meth. I
cannot tolerate brutal never-ending unnecessary wars and I cannot allow
gay rights to be bashed and I truly loathe watching women's rights be
slammed back to 1952. Or 1852.

I really have little patience for the gutting of our school system and
the decimation of science and mysticism and the human mind for the sake
of a handful of militant Christian zealots who truly believe the Second
Coming will be arriving really soon but hopefully not before the next
episode of HBO's "Cathouse: The Series," which they watch in secret
with the lights off while clutching a Bible in one hand and a big tub
of Country Crock margarine in the other.

I cannot tolerate an American president, ostensibly meant to be one of
the most articulate and intellectually sophisticated leaders on the
planet, mumbling his semicoherent support of the embarrassing nontheory
of "Intelligent Design," to the detriment of about 300 years of
confirmed science and 10 million years of common sense to the point
where America's armies of dumbed-down Ritalin-drunk children look at
him and sigh and secretly wish they could have a future devoid of such
imbecilic thought but who realize, deep down, they are merely another
doomed and fraught generation who will face an increasingly steep
uphill battle, who will actually have to fight for fact and
intellectual growth and spiritual progress against a rising tide of
ignorance and religious hegemony and sanitized revisionist textbooks
that insult their understanding and sucker punch their sexuality and
bleed their minds dry.

I have surpassed my allowable limit for how much environmental
devastation I can willingly swallow or how many billion-dollar tax
subsidies our cowardly CEO president gives his cronies in Big Energy
while doing nothing to ease our gluttony for foreign oil, all the while
trying to tell us how many undereducated misguided American teenage
soldiers we have to sacrifice at the bloody altar of oil and empire
before we can call ourselves king of the bone pile again.

But I am perhaps most intolerant, not of Christians per se, not of
faith, certainly not of radiant self-defined spirituality, not even of
organized religion, though I do fully believe more independent spirits
and raw human souls and moist sexual licks have been lost to its often
narrow-minded and cosmically rigid brainwashing techniques than have
ever been saved. But hey, that's just me.

I am most intolerant of, well, of those who allow such intolerance. Of
those who would, based on their narrow views of sex, God, love, hope,
war, the mind, the Earth, soil and animals and air and water and fire
and love and spirit and drugs and guns and dildos, work to legislate
those neoconservative beliefs, codify them, make them the law of the
land, force their regressive beliefs on everyone else under punishment
of violence and beatings and prison. I am, in short, intolerant of
intolerance.

Oh, let us be clear. I love diversity, religious pluralism, peace and
love and pacifism and good drugs and open-mouthed sensuality, happy to
let you believe in any god you like and marry any gender you like and
let you love how you will and be in full control of your sex and your
body and your mind.

This, to me, is the America worth fighting for. These are the laws I
support. Don't believe in abortion? Don't understand gay people?
Sexuality make you rashy? Think Harry Potter teaches kids evil and
witchcraft? Don't marry a sexy gay witch abortionist. But don't you
dare, based on your limited understanding of God and life, make laws
declaring that I can't.

But maybe this is the problem, especially here in San Francisco, the
World Headquarters of Tolerance, where liberals tend to be so PC and
open-minded they merely sigh and shrug when our government and half of
the nation move to outlaw everything they stand for, when they openly
loathe human rights and try to codify homophobia in the U.S.
Constitution and slowly annihilate Roe v. Wade and treat any display of
resistance or questioning of the norm the way a dog treats a fire
hydrant.

Enough. Basta. Let's refashion the old, stagnant definition of
tolerance and make it less about merely enduring, merely putting up
with the existence of other narrow-minded beliefs no matter how
devastating and embarrassing they obviously are to the nation's health.


Rather, let's flip that sucker over and baste it with raw goat butter
and sear it on the open flames of divine justice and bliss and
intellectual fire and white-hot orgasm and burn it new.

Let us take the rather flaccid word tolerance and pump it full of
Ecstasy and medical marijuana and sake and real divine love and fancy
book learnin', turn it on its head and spin it like a bottle and
reclaim it from the neocon Right and turn it into, say, giddy outrage.
Or radical reconsideration. Or ecstatic rebellion. Or wet conscious
electric pointed awareness. Is this not a better way?

Let us explode those dead meanings, correct the mistaken neocon
dictionary. Let us hurl that dying and mealy and abused term back at
their powerful and often bigoted scowl. Here is your weak, ineffectual
tolerance. We cannot swallow it anymore. In fact, we are choking on it.