Bernard Lewis wrote:
In a letter written to a Jewish community leader in Newport Rhode Island , in 1790, George Washington explained how the new republic embodied the prinicipal:
The citizens of the United States of America... all possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the government of the United States, which give to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
In these words, the first president of the United States expressed with striking clarity the real difference between tolerance and coexistence. Tolerance means that a dominant group, whether defined by faith or race or other criteria, allows to members of other groups some - but rarely if ever all- of the rights and privileges enjoyed by its own members. Coexistence means equality between the different groups composing a political society as an inherent natural right of all of them - to grant it is no merit, to withhold or limit it is an offense.
The citizens of the United States of America... all possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the government of the United States, which give to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
In these words, the first president of the United States expressed with striking clarity the real difference between tolerance and coexistence. Tolerance means that a dominant group, whether defined by faith or race or other criteria, allows to members of other groups some - but rarely if ever all- of the rights and privileges enjoyed by its own members. Coexistence means equality between the different groups composing a political society as an inherent natural right of all of them - to grant it is no merit, to withhold or limit it is an offense.
The article itself was written 1993 and was talking about the emergence of secularism in christianity and its lack of counterpart in the muslim world, but as I read it, I couldnt but help to attribute that one point to the argument (as beaten as a dead horse as it is) of gay marriage.
To often are the ideals of the founding fathers invoked as a means of exclusion and otherness in order to limit the rights of people as "unamerican" when in doing so they actually rape the enlightenment ideals upon which the nation was founded. To often do those with barely the most general knowledge of the founding fathers use them in rhetorical way in order to invoke a message that directly contradicts what the founding fathers were actually about.
Be wary of those that blindly invoke that which is most important, who do so in the name of rhetoric in a most general sort of way, because in the end they are destroying your most important values. As truly as those that hold people without charge or trial are destroying what America stands for. They play on ignorance and blind patriotism in order to kill the informed and intelligent inclusive mind set that the founding fathers used to create the United States of America.
/liberal rant off
edit- just in response to the fact that every gay marriage argument you eventually hear the term "the founding fathers could never have taken that into account therefore we should limit it as to what we feel acceptable as hetero americans on a **** minority.
Edited, Tue Nov 8 13:37:07 2005 by bodhisattva
Edited, Tue Nov 8 13:36:06 2005 by bodhisattva