Maggie's Farm

One’s reaction to Cathy’s remarks shouldn’t turn on views of gay marriage – an issue so far from being a closed conversation that polling routinely shows the public split roughly down the middle on it. Rather, it should be anchored in the simple fact that the Chick-fil-A president didn’t breathe a word of intolerance, bigotry or even derision. In fact, he didn’t even make a political statement.

The poisonous trend at work here is a complete inversion of the traditional understanding of “tolerance.”

As articulated in the great Western tradition of liberalism (the name given to the political philosophy espousing individual liberty before it was hijacked by statists), tolerance means granting others the freedom of their own actions and views so long as they don’t harm others.

This view was ably expressed by Thomas Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia, when, in regard to religious liberty, he said, “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”