This is from Timothy Ferris's new book The Science of Liberty : Liberalism is inherently nonpartisan: It means freedom for all, or it means nothing at all. It maintains that everyone benefits from everyone’s freedom, and that all are diminished whenever one individual or group is not free. This precept can contort liberals into the uncomfortable posture known as tolerance. Some think that tolerance means treating all opinions as equally deserving of respect, but the point of liberalism is not that all views are equally valid. It is that society has no reliable way to evaluate opinions other than to let everybody freely express and criticize them — and, if they can garner sufficient support, to try them out. It was difficult even for the founders of liberalism to fully embrace tolerance. John Locke would have denied equal rights to atheists: “Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God.” he declared, in his A Letter Concerning Toleration , since the “ promis...
The fearless blog about homelessness that serves the city and county of Sacramento, CA. Written by Tom Armstrong