The Examiner: A Worthwhile Read

One of the pleasures of getting back into the habit of blogging is the reading the must precede most posts. If you haven't already availed yourself of what Mark Tapscott is doing at the Examiner, I highly recommend it, for reasons both professional and personal (more below).

The Examiner is a free daily that can be picked up all around metro Washington, DC and plans to expand. When I lived there I read it often, and since Mark (a long-time friend of Democracy Project) took over the editorial page, it has become a daily stop on my morning reading rounds. Today, Mark warns of the danger to free speech posed by the tendency of some in power to punish those whose speech they deem "intolerant." In this case, Robert Smith, a member of the Metro board, was fired for expressing thoughts deemed "intolerant" by some of his peers and by Maryland Gov. Robert Erlich. The subject: homosexuality, which Smith called a "deviancy."

As I see it, the question here is purely political, in the sense that the First Amendment guarantees our right to political speech. Are Smith's beliefs on this issue, as he expressed them in the act that cost him his job, themselves so deviant--so intolerable--that they cannot be tolerated? Intolerance is, like discrimination, a slippery term that can be stood on its head by any cleaver demagogue. Some behaviors and words are indeed intolerable in a public official, and no one has an obligation to tolerate just anything at all in order to be tolerant of others. Similarly, all of us discriminate--in the careers we choose, the jobs we hold, the food we eat, the cars we drive, the friends with whom we associate, and the neighborhoods in which we live. But discrimination, like tolerance, can be misused and abused in a way that is, well, intolerable.

What Mark's editorial draws our attention to is the politicized (and selective) use of the concept of tolerance. By this manner, the threshold of tolerance isn't widened in any broadly liberal sense, but is rather applied selectively to one's opponents so as to enforce one's own beliefs (and, let us not forget, repay one's allies). These aren't the virtues of a republic based on a healthy civil society, but the machinations of an entrenched elite bent on driving from the public square speech it had rather not hear.

The personal note: I am fortunate to have been chosen by Mark to contribute an occasional op-ed to the Examiner's pages. Other contributors to this space are also bloggers (see below). My first installment will run on July 11, not long after I return from a policy wonkish trip to Belgium and Germany. Today's installment is by a blogger familiar to DP's readers: Stephen Bainbridge. Steve's piece is titled "Why Cut and Run Won't Work in Iraq." Money graf:

As an Army brat growing up during the Vietnam War, I saw the damage our strategy of just declaring victory and going home did to Army morale and prestige, to the tone of our national politics and our nation’s standing in the world. Later, we cut and ran from Lebanon. More recently, we cut and ran from Somalia. I have no doubt that this pattern of cutting and running emboldened al-Qaida. We simply cannot afford to cut and run from Iraq, lest our foes be emboldened to new and even more devastating attacks. A global hegemon that keeps running away when the going gets tough will not command any respect.

The other blogger contributors to the Examiner column are: Betsy Newmark; Ed Morrissey; Jeralyn Merritt; Mary Katherine Ham; LaShawn Barber; Lorie Byrd (whose first piece appeared June 13); and Robert Cox.