I’m heading out of town for the weekend, but I wanted to share an article from First Things before I leave. George Cardinal Pell writes about ‘intolerant tolerance‘, which is a subject I have found very interesting.

Many on the political left claim the mantle of ‘tolerance’ and predicate many of their political and moral stances upon being ‘tolerant’ of others. Gay rights and gay marriage issues are often couched in these terms, for example, and we right-wingers are oft’ labeled as being ‘intolerant’ because we have different opinions on this and other issues.

What is interesting though is that tolerance means accepting others opinions even if you disagree with them. I am ‘tolerant’ when I support and defend the rights of (as an example) anti-war protesters to march on Washington, even when I disagree with them. This, however, doesn’t go both ways these days. Left-wingers would be ‘tolerant’ to support and defend my rights to march for what I believe in too, but if I were to march against abortion or against the legalization of gay marriage I’d be labeled a misogynist, homophobic, hate-monger unworthy of speaking in the public square (and soon I might be subject to arrest for ‘hate speech’).

We must be tolerant of others’ Constitutionally protected liberty to live, speak, practice their religion, bear arms, and so on without fear of repercussion. If we, as a society, don’t protect these core, enumerated human rights, then we have truly lost the republic and our liberty.

Janet Adamy and Jonathan Weisman wrote in yesterday’s Wall St. Journal about how the visceral outrage manifesting itself at Health Care Town Halls and other public meetings is about much more than health care. President Barack Obama’s (D) and Congress’s misguided proposals to reform our screwed-up health care system have brought the anger out of the wood-work, but the anger is indeed much deeper and about much more fundamental issues.

Yes, the health care proposals have plenty of things in them to make normal Americans mad. But we’re also mad about the ballooning federal deficits. We put a new party in the White House (and gave them large super-majorities in Congress) on a promise that they would ‘change’ this maddening federal spending, and those new leaders have promptly quadrupled the deficits we wanted them to eliminate.

And it gets even deeper than that. The out of control spending under this administration and the last are symptoms of a government that answers to itself, not to us. It’s a government that blithely oversteps the authorities granted it by the Constitution and is slowly-but-surely seizing more and more control over our lives. We saw Bush spending billions to bail out Wall Street investors and misguided car companies and angrily voted for a new direction. Obama, following his election, went right about his business with the same massive bailouts, the government seizure of banks and car companies, and then embarked on an effort to seize control of our health care.

It’s interesting that our Constitutional scholar president seems, like most of his colleagues, to have never read the 9th and Tenth Amendments. The people are mad that they are losing their republic, and in the coming elections they will likely vote accordingly.