Tolerance, but only for the tolerant, of course

So in the ongoing saga of the sexy penguins, I decided to check out Google today (I would have done it earlier, but I was having technical difficulties) and found out that sure enough, a Google image search for "sexy penguin" pulls up a link to this blog as the #2 match. For those who might care about the numbers other than myself, I'm trying to keep a running total, and I've presently got 126 out of 157 hits, or roughly 80% of my visitors being people looking for a picture of a sexy penguin.

However, I'm not here to rant about sexy penguins and the people who love them...this time. I am going back to retouch on the original topic in order to use it as a launching point into another topic that's always bugged me.

Quick recap for those who can't be bothered to read the original post: A pro-same-sex marriage organization launched a campaign in Colorado based on the idea that a person who was sexually attracted to members of the same gender is just as normal as a dog that goes "moo". An anti-same-sex marriage organization, rather than pointing out the ridiculousness of this argument as I would have done, launched a counter-campaign to inform the public that dogs in fact do not go "moo". This high level of debate truly shows how serious this issue is.

Well, in tracking down the Google image search result for "sexy penguin", I noticed that under the picture, there was a snippet of text from my blog reading "...mooing dogs and sexy penguins." Curious, I tried a new image search for "mooing dogs", which my blog came up as the #1 hit! (Note that this is only on an image search; a regular web search did not give a link to my blog in the first 150 hits. The first blog hit was for this site, which rants about thwarting the "Heterosexual agenda" because "Dogs are really hard to milk." Good writing.)

As usual, I'm taking far to long to come to my point. Not too far down in the list of hits, I came across this article. Apparently a family in Colorado Springs has had their lawn repeatedly vandalized for having the audacity to put signs on it that feature a picture of a dog saying "Woof." The unknown people who vandalized the lawn and the signs by either stealing them or defacing them actually left notes for the family telling them that "YOU ARE NO BETTER THAN A TERRORIST BECAUSE YOU DISPLAYED THAT SIGN!" They even went so far as to specifically compare them to the September 11th WTC attackers.

I've got to say that this perplexes me on many levels. While I see no evidence in the article that the vandals ever used the specific word "tolerance", the concept was there, as they had written "STOP THE HATE" on the street near the house. I realize that this story was published by a news outlet that is affiliated in some manner (I'm not sure how closely) with the publishers of the "No-Moo-Lies.com" web site, and as such, it is doing its darnedest to paint this conservative family in a positive light, but still, the only "hate" I'm seeing here is on the part of the vandals.

While the family with the signs is indeed sending out a message (albeit fairly subtly) that many may find offensive, all they are doing in the end is expressing an opinion. The vandals are trespassing, damaging private and public property, and probably could easily be construed as threatening the physical safety of others. Why would they prefer to do that rather than pursue a number of perfectly legal and reasonable countermeasures? They could put up signs in their own yards. They could write letters to the family telling them intelligently why they disagree with their position and why they feel it is offensive. They could write letters to local newspapers. They could peaceably conduct a protest in the street in front of the lawn with the signs. And of course, they could vote, and I hope they did. One of the neat things about each of those is that they don't require sneaking around in the middle of the night.

Legality and even morality aside, though, there is a social phenomenon that I've found rather odd lately. I think most people tend to think of the freedoms outlined in the First Amendment in terms of a protection for the liberal free thinkers of our society. If I want to say that George W. Bush is an idiot, I can do so freely. If I want to have my children go to school and not have to practice some sort of state religion, then I'm all set for that, too. Lately it seems like a reversal of that sort of thinking has happened, though. In our society at large, you aren't allowed to like the President because we should all agree that he's evil. You aren't allowed to make any public expression of your religious beliefs lest it offend, because we should all value multiculturalism over all other values. You aren't allowed to think that morality as defined by your personal beliefs has any basis or right to be addressed because we should all with uniform assent that morality is relative.

That's what it really boils down to, and don't you see that there is an inherent hypocrisy and/or lapse of logic in that position? The only absolute value is relativism. All viewpoints should be allowed except for those that question whether all viewpoints should be allowed. Society should have no tolerance for those that practice intolerance. Argh... It makes my brain hurt sometimes.

Look, it's an opinion. Some people in Colorado think same-sex marriage should be allowed; others think it should be disallowed. These are just opinions, same as the opinion that people shouldn't judge others for their sexual orientation. Who is to decide which opinions should be allowed and which should be silenced? It's not simply a matter of being offended, because I assure you that on 99.9% of all issues, there will be somebody offended by either position.

There are a lot of people (and while I tend to feel "homophobia" is an overused term, it seems appropriate here) that are absolutely appalled at the thought of a gay pride parade, but is that single fact good enough reason to disallow such a display? I really feel that the First Amendment allows for people to hold a parade for any reason (so long as they avoid undue disruption of, well, traffic, I guess) be it the local high school's homecoming, abortion rights, a war protest, or even if your local chapter of the KKK wants to put on a show. Excepting probably the first of those examples, there's going to be a lot of people upset by such parades, but my advice is if you don't like it, then stay away, or go and organize a peaceful counter-demonstration. If you show up at an event and hassle or even attack the people there, you just let them believe they are some sort of martyrs for a great cause.

Did you read the article about the family with the vandalized signs? In the end, who wins that moral struggle? Isn't it the poor victimized folks with the peaceful signs on their yard? Completely disregarding what their signs say, and the ideas they are intended to convey to passers-by, aren't they the ones with the moral high ground because the opposition took the position of oppressor? Whoever it was that took those signs, they ought to know that they may have set their cause back more than No-Moo-Lies.com ever could.

Whys and wherefores without wherewithal

What happened five years ago on September 11, 2001 means something different to everyone, but for just about every American, it was a life-changing moment in time.

The people of my generation were told that we would remember 9/11 vividly the way a previous generation would remember the assassination of President Kennedy. I do actually remember fairly vividly many of the details of that morning. I remember sleeping in on that morning, as I had already decided to take the day off of work for personal reasons, and the phone rang. It was my mother-in-law, who urged me and my wife to turn on the television. "Somebody's bombed New York or something!" We turned it on in time to see the first building collapse.

For me though, there was an eerie quality to the whole first half of September that I occasionally play over in my mind. For me personally, the events of 9/11/2001 were one tragedy in the midst of a string of several that happened in my life. In my life, but not directly to me, I suppose, tragedy is a strange thing. Tragedies come with a factor of distance and severity. The other tragedies were closer to me but of course less severe than a pair of 100-story buildings collapsing to kill several thousand people. Still, the exchange in those factors made them all seem fairly even to me in a fashion; does that make sense?

Many of the things that happened were too personal to discuss here, but I will speak of the first and the last of them all. First, a beloved family member passed away. There had just been a funeral, right at the start of the month. He had gone to the doctor complaining of some problems, and the doctor had told him nothing was wrong, he should go home and rest. So he did. A couple days later, he was dead.

Why did the doctor miss his diagnosis? Why did this man accept the diagnosis without question, even as his symptoms grew worse? Why did he have to die? Why does it hurt for those of us left behind even though all of us who were believers in Christ were certain of this man's salvation, and felt it safe to assume he was in heaven? None of those are questions that are easy to answer.

The last thing that happened, to me anyway, was that I received notice of a friend and co-worker from a couple years back having committed suicide. She was an intelligent, beautiful, fun person that everybody liked, and she seemed to have a lot going for her as far as anybody knew. But apparently on the 9th of September, she hung herself in her apartment, and wasn't discovered until nearly a week after. She left no note.

Why did she kill herself? What was it that was causing her enough suffering that dying seemed like an improvement over her situation? Was there anything that I myself could have done, either at the time or back years previously when I had known her better, to change her mind? Does suicide really relieve one of suffering if there is an afterlife? Might she have suffered worse or found a reason to live if she had waited a few more days and seen the horror in New York? These are questions that are virtually impossible to answer.

But while I had never been to New York, while I had never seen the towers in person, while I didn't know any of the people who died on *that* day, some of the most nagging questions linger on that central event. When two planes crashed into towers in New York and two tried (one unsuccessfully) to crash into buildings in Washington, DC, we were left with a lot of questions that I sometimes wonder who is asking.

Why? Don't we want to know why? This isn't about 72 houris awaiting each hijacker in paradise, not to Osama bin Laden. This isn't about "Islamofascists" who "hate freedom". I don't buy that. Osama bin Laden wanted to send a message to the world. Even if we refuse to respect that message, even if we condemn that message for the brutal manner in which it was sent, doesn't the severity of that make us want to sit up and at least hear what it was he was trying to say? If only to respond intelligently?

It's an odd thing about myself. My religious beliefs lead me to hold the view that human beings are, at their heart, evil. Yet at the same time, I believe that there also exists a drive in people that makes them desire to do what they think is the right thing. Bin Laden and his cohorts who planned out and executed the attacks of 9/11 may appear to be evil, and indeed, they most likely are. Isn't it not just possible, but likely that they believed that what they were doing was the right thing to do? The 19 hijackers were willing to give their lives for it. The al-Qaeda organization, while maybe weaker than it once was, still exists, so I assume its members didn't look at 9/11 and say, "My, that was a bit too brutal for my tastes!"

The majority of the people of the world heard about what had happened to our country on 9/11, and their sympathy and support went out to us as a nation. That is a good thing. However, there exists a minority of the world's population who, upon hearing the news, celebrated. Some of these people are in fact so elated by this attack, that if they had the chance to be a part of another attack like it in the future, they wouldn't hesitate. This is a phenomenon that makes me want to ask "Why?" but unlike the other things that make me want to ask "Why?" there are people who are willing, able, and probably eager to answer it. Shouldn't more of us be asking?