The liberal, he continued to say, has the opposite problem. The liberal gets off to a good start by loving the sinner. So far so good! However, he takes his love for the sinner and ends up embracing or loving the sin. As such, he ends up loving both. This is not good because loving the sin (or accepting it in the name of compassion) is contrary to the love our neighbor. After all, sin enslaves and completely undermines our neighbor’s happiness. In the former case, people suffer from the wrong kind of intolerance; in the latter, the wrong kind of tolerance.
The world is riddled with these two problems. But Christ teaches us a different way: We are to love the sinner and hate the sin. In our culture, we forget that the genuineness and intensity of love is dependent upon our willingness to hate sin. A parent who is overly tolerant of his or her child’s unruly or dangerous behavior is lacking in the fundamental duty of parental and Christian love. In society, this can be expressed in “accepting people for who they are.” What this often translates into is tolerating sinful behaviors and lifestyles.
Homosexuality, for instance, began to be tolerated in society in 1973 with the DSM-R III (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; published by the American Psychiatric Association). At that time it was removed from the DSM-R III and no longer diagnosed as a disorder. Nearly 40 years later, however, to publicly disapprove of homosexuality or same-sex marriage is to run the risk of being censured by the media or likelihood of paying a price corporately by losing one's job. To be sure, many political powers that be are on the threshold of legislating that criticism of homosexuality is a hate crime.
This kind of tolerance is nothing less than confusing license (the freedom to do what we want to do) with liberty (the freedom to do what we ought to do). As Pope Leo XIII said over a century ago, what license gains, liberty loses; that is, to the degree immoral acts are tolerated, we lose the liberty to pursue justice and goodness. But why is that? Because license is an indiscriminate and imprudent form of tolerance! In accepting immoral values, it ceases to acknowledge proper standards and boundaries. However, this can work the other way too.
We forget that the flipside of acceptance is rejection. And if license goes too far in accepting that which is evil, it will go too far in rejecting the good. The violation of human rights, private property rights and religious liberty proceeds from the spirit of license. Indeed, a liberal tolerance of any value or lifestyle is but the groundwork for a dictatorial intolerance.
Pope Benedict XVI called this kind of intolerance "The Dictatorship of Relativism." It is a kind of dictatorship that masquerades as being principled. But nothing could be further from the truth! It's coercive and repressive measures are subjective in that they are based on likes, dislikes and expediency. Vladimir Solovyov, an 18th century Russian philosopher and convert to the Catholic Faith, reminded his fellow countrymen (before the Russian Revolution of 1917) that when government is inspired by the instinct of "I want..." or “Mine!” then there are no limits to political power. All boundaries are erased. Unfortunately, the Russian people learned the hard way during much of the twentieth century. And it may be that Americans will have to learn from experience in the twenty-first century.
