‘I won’t tolerate your intolerance’

That post below kind of ends on the note that there have to be some moral certainties, universally applied and unflinchingly defended.

NRO has this piece today about how that’s working, or not, on American university campuses.

For two decades, America’s schools and colleges have made a signal virtue of “tolerance” and the “celebration” of diversity. When skeptics have voiced concerns that these bumper-sticker sentiments pose a threat to free speech and intellectual freedom, or threaten to substitute the habits of therapy for those of disciplined inquiry, they have been dismissed as retrograde curmudgeons.

Tolerance is a cardinal virtue when it entails parties disagreeing over questions of beliefs, values, and culture, but respecting the rights of their opponents to live and politic within the confines of the American constitutional order. However, in today’s colleges and universities, tolerance has too often evolved into a watery, uncritical acceptance of illiberal behavior.

Like this:

As the Washington Post’s Marc Fisher reported, University of Maryland student Mia Lazarus recently went to buy some chips and juice at the Maryland Food Collective. The clerk at this grocery and sandwich shop in the student union read her t-shirt’s “Baltimore Zionist District” and “I Stand for Israel” slogans and then declared, “Your shirt offends me. I won’t ring you up.”

This is ridiculous.

Another coop cashier eventually sold Lazarus her chips and juice. But more instructive than Lazarus’s ability to finally buy her groceries has been the aftermath. After an hours-long, “teary” meeting between Lazarus, her friends, and the collective, the coop agreed that it would serve any customer who wasn’t physically or verbally abusive, but that workers offended by a customer’s politics could arrange for another clerk to serve a patron…

Coop employees told the Post’s Fisher that “no one should have to have contact with people whose views they find hurtful.”

Now there’s a society we want to build for the future, eh? Where is the art of the debate, the intellectual engagement of ideas? Where are the critical thinking skills?

Asked whether allowing clerks to selectively refuse to serve customers was acceptable, or whether it rested on the same troubling rationale that once supported “separate but equal,” Lazarus rejected the analogy. “Separate but equal wasn’t equal,” she told him. “In this case, I’m getting the same service, but it’s just from a different cashier.”

….What?

Exactly how “tolerance” devolved into coddling those who choose to take offense for the slightest of reasons is a question for another day (although decades of experience demonstrates that on-campus tolerance is more frequently understood as the right of “victims” to air grievances than of heterogeneous speakers to be heard). Another question is how and why we’ve allowed identity politics to constrict public spaces.

Actually, that first part is pretty important, since many campuses just won’t tolerate speakers who offer differing viewpoints and…balance.

The champions of “tolerance” have pitched it as a costless and all-embracing virtue, all the while dismissing or sidestepping concerns that it might dim critical faculties or undermine commitment to core American values. Indeed, the goings-on at the Maryland Food Collective suggest just how readily this doctrine can become tantamount to unilateral intellectual and moral disarmament.

The danger of that surrender is on the horizon, unless we stop giving up and giving in to political correctness and moral relativism.