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This "New Tolerance" is a product of modern society's rejection of God. You see, if there is no God, then there are no objective standards. Every person's opinion is as good and valid as any other person's. And no one has a right to judge or condemn any one else — unless, of course, the person is exhibiting some form of intolerance!
That is the reason modern society hates the Ten Commandments so much. They are constantly ridiculed in the press. Ted Turner, the media mogul, has rewritten them, converting them into humanistic platitudes which he calls "The Ten Suggestions."
In colleges and universities across America, the worst thing that can happen to a student is to be accused of intolerance. Merely the accusation will often result in the accused person being required to take a course in sensitivity training, and this course must be finished before any other credit course can be taken! And what happens in the course? The person is bombarded with propaganda in an attempt to brainwash him into believing that all lifestyles have equal merit.
The Moral Consequences
The "New Tolerance" has created a moral vacuum that, in turn, has produced some very strange consequences.
A good example of what I am talking about can be found in the "Naked Guy" incident that occurred on the UCLA campus a couple of years ago. You probably remember seeing reports of it on television.
A student decided that he would start attending classes naked. For days he went from class to class stark naked, and no one was willing to stand up and say, "What you are doing is wrong. It is immoral. Put your clothes back on!" After all, to make such a statement would have been intolerant.
But when the incident got national attention through the media, the administration decided that something had to be done. So, the fellow was finally disciplined on the grounds of the politically correct charge of "sexual harassment."
Again, when God is removed from the picture, objective standards collapse, and all truth becomes relative.
This was illustrated vividly in a recent article in The Journal of Higher Education. Two college professors reported independently of each other that they had discovered their students were unwilling to make any moral judgments, even regarding the most obscene things. One reported that his students were unwilling to condemn the Holocaust; the other reported that his students could not bring themselves to condemn the Aztec practice of human sacrifice!
In the next part of "The New Tolerance," we'll look at how it has affected academia and American culture.
