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But then you’re doubling down on any self-segregation. It’s the same with black-on-black violence: targets are rarely chosen from the general population, but from those close to the perpetrator.
Plus, there’s a difference between accepting other interracial marriages and feeling such attraction yourself.
I was going to mention this, but I got sidetracked. I think a major change in the last 50 years is that people are less willing to impose their standards of morality on other people. I suppose the rot set in when Haughey suggested "An Irish solution to an Irish problem." Ireland was obliged by their Supreme Court to legalize contraception, so after five years, a law was passed to allow pharmacists to dispense contraceptives to married couples (who were presumably Protestants). Allowing others to commit sin was always wrong before then.
There was a time when people believed that morality was universal and things that were wrong, were wrong. We went through a phase where people really felt that they should not judge, perhaps most clearly exemplified by Pope Francis, when he said "Who am I to judge?" The obvious answer to this is written in six-foot-high letters of gold around the dome of his church: "I give you the keys of the kingdom." He, by right of apostolic succession, is the heir of Peter, and what he binds on earth will be bound in heaven. How he forgot this, I do not know.
It seems the age of tolerance is coming to an end, however, and the pendulum will swing all the way to the other side. We will move from an era where contraception was banned (as immoral) through one where there was freedom of choice, to an era where the state will force people to but contraception for others. I suppose it is change if not progress.
Fifty years? My brother in Christ, we’re talking about the whole Enlightenment.
Back in the good ol’ days, moral outrage was less likely to decide your fate than plague or starvation. As state capacity grew and the world shrank, maybe that became less true. By the time of the European Wars of Religion, a little intolerance was able to deal a lot more damage.
It turns out enshrining some sort of tolerance frees up surplus. Common cause to deal with the real enemy, perhaps, or simply peace for those weary of war. The philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries went to great lengths to justify cooperation instead of defection. Sometimes they even succeeded, for a while, until the incentives to defect piled up.
By the American Revolution, states professed a morality of high-minded ideals. These dominated because they gave a real, material advantage over states with low tolerance. America’s North was willing to tolerate both the moral evil and the political threat of the South, because most people involved saw the sanctity of the Union as more valuable. When war came, millions bled.
The next century saw America rise to power as a (relatively) unified bloc. The more dire an outside threat, the more benefit could be gained from tolerating those close to you. Other comments note how WWII made major strides in American race relations, since an African American was still no Kraut. Across the globe, this was the century of ideological alliances, a first, second and third world. And the first world, the one preaching Enlightenment ideals, was the victor.
Pope Francis said that a man’s gayness was less important than whether “he searches for the Lord and has good will.” That framing of tolerance has always been one of the great advantages of Christianity.
1 Corinthians 3:5.
No, he asked who was he to judge, forgetting his position. He could decide to make homosexual actions not a sin. It is within his power. It would be like Biden declining to decide on nuking Russia in the event of a first strike - "I'd hate to be the person who needed to make that decision." Biden is the person with the power, so it would be idiocy for him to claim that he was not. The same applies to Trump, Obama, Bush, etc. Being president means that you are responsible for making certain decisions. Being pope, another set.
In the mid 60s, it was common for people to argue that certain behaviors (free love, communism, vegetarianism, pacifism) were right and thus should be allowed. Only in the 70s, as I recall, was there a movement to argue that certain behaviors were wrong (hard drugs, political extremism, BDSM etc.), but should be allowed. This position took a huge step back in the 80s and 90s with the Moral Majority and pretty much disappeared with the rise of the progressive movement in the 2010s (as now both extremes were against legalizing vices). Skokie is probably the high watermark for tolerance.
Can you imagine a modern politician being in favor of legalizing something that they thought was deeply morally wrong? Perhaps Rand/Ron Paul or Sinema on a good day.
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