The Christians who want to be intolerant again. Just to be difficult (I do love to be difficult, you know), I want to add that there is one place where one of the complainants had a point, though not a religious point.

In a 2004 case, for instance, an AT&T Broadband employee won the right to express his religious convictions by refusing to sign a pledge to “respect and value the differences among us.” As long as the employee wasn’t harassing co-workers, the company had to make accommodations for his faith, a federal judge in Colorado ruled.

That’s a pretty grotesque pledge, frankly. It’s a pretty demanding employer who wants to tell employees what to respect and value, and it’s … Read the rest

Well, this ‘Christians suing for right to be intolerant‘ thing is certainly a place where free speech rights (and the ‘free exercise’ clause and reason and religion and quite a few other things) get interesting, or difficult, or both.

Ruth Malhotra went to court last month for the right to be intolerant. Malhotra says her Christian faith compels her to speak out against homosexuality. But the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she’s a senior, bans speech that puts down others because of their sexual orientation. Malhotra sees that as an unacceptable infringement on her right to religious expression. So she’s demanding that Georgia Tech revoke its tolerance policy. With her lawsuit, the 22-year-old student joins a growing campaign to

Todd Gitlin asks a searching question:

Sects are always in need of heretics to blame, expel and punish. First, fervor takes hold, then rigidity. Righteousness dictates uniformity. Dissent seems dangerous, even treasonous. The spirit hardens: You’re either with us or with the evildoers…Why is the left so determined to eat its own? Sometimes it can be explained as the fervor of fighters determined to root out impurities.

Indeed – and the fervor of fighters determined to root out impurities is a very scary thing. And before I get all righteous, I should note that I probably have a tendency that way myself. Perhaps a strong one. There are quite a few ‘impurities’ that I want, if not to root … Read the rest