Whatever happened to tolerance?
by Will Jones, The Conservative Woman:
ONE day Stagecoach were sponsoring the Turner Prize, the next day they weren’t. Why did the prestigious arts award eschew the generous offer of money from the transport company? Because the chairman of Stagecoach’s parent company, Sir Brian Souter, is a conservative who has recently been active in opposing LGBT teaching in schools. In 2000, he opposed the repeal of Section 28 (a 1988 law which banned the promotion of homosexuality in schools).
Our cultural elites are becoming less and less tolerant of socially conservative views, especially on sexuality, except when complaints are made by Muslims. Then another order of values comes into play. Otherwise anyone suspected of ‘homophobic’ views – by which they mean any kind of disapproval of same-sex relationships – is hunted down and purged from public life.
[…] This is a new orthodoxy, a new Test Act, typically expressed in statements of ‘equality, diversity and inclusion’ to which all public figures and academics must express allegiance. Dissent will not be tolerated.
What happened to tolerance? The answer is that tolerance for many post-1960s progressives was really only ever a demand for conservatives to loosen their moral standards and be more permissive in things which supposedly didn’t affect them personally. It was a Left-liberal idea with built-in Left-liberal bias: tolerance for things which liberals wanted permitting, intolerance for the ‘hate’ of conservatives who still held on to reservations or objections to them.
Tolerance for the Left is typically a one-way street. That’s why the mobs mobilise to skewer Scruton for uttering the word ‘tribes’ when describing how a country might feel about mass immigration. Yet no such outrage is found for, say, Peter Tatchell, who is well-known for pushing the sexual liberty boundaries. He is wheeled out by the BBC to express how ‘disappointed’ he is at Stagecoach’s involvement in the Turner Prize – that’s our society’s idea of progress.
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