While the old tolerance was in some ways a parasitic virtue-that is, it depended for its life on decisions as to how much leeway might be allowed to a person who wished to advocate or take up a position outside the accepted norms and laws of a society… the new tolerance is not parasitic on a larger structure. Rather, the new tolerance is itself the highest good, the ultimate virtue, trumping everything else….

Since The Intolerance of Tolerance was published,1 readers have been sending me new examples they have spotted-examples of egregious intolerance masquerading in the name of tolerance. Sometimes these examples have been accompanied with a plea to incorporate them in any revised edition that might be called for. Of course, I too have spotted a handful of examples myself. In this editorial I’d like to comment briefly on three of them, probing a little to uncover what we should learn from them. Although the book drew on examples in both Europe and America, the follow three have surfaced in the United States.

The first is the drama that unfolded around Chick-fil-A. By now, the bare narrative is well-known. When Dan Cathy, president of Chick-fil-A, a man known for his Christian commitments, declared that he supported traditional heterosexual marriage, he was soon attacked in the press, in blog posts, and in some talk shows as homophobic, a hate monger, and worse-despite the fact that he himself had never used the word “homosexual” and despite the fact that no one seemed able to tell of a credible instance when Chick-fil-A staff at any of their outlets had ever treated any class of customers with less than the courtesy in which the staff were trained. Protests by the LGBT crowd followed at some sites, while supporters bought countless tens of thousands of meals in a show of support. More interesting, perhaps, was the announcement by several big-city mayors, Washington D.C.’s Vincent Gray, Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel, and San Francisco’s Edwin Lee, that they would prevent Chick-fil-A outlets from opening in their cities since they did not want to encourage any business characterized by such intolerance. They were soon joined by the mayor of Boston and the mayor of Philadelphia. By contrast, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City, declared that however repellent he found Dan Cathy’s views to be, government should stay clear of such pronouncements and interference with businesses that were not in any sense breaking the law.

How should we think about this little drama?

That some conservatives like Dan Cathy articulate their beliefs, while some liberals respond with their own voice, is not intrinsically problematic so far as issues of tolerance and intolerance are concerned. That the debate grabbed media attention and escalated into demonstrations against Chick-fil-A and counter movements that voiced approval for the organization by flooding the outlets with orders is part of the give-and-take of any society that cherishes free speech, no matter how much each side thinks the other is morally wrong. Somewhat troubling is the way several big-city mayors hopped on the band-wagon and declared that they would use their powers to keep Chick-fil-A out of their cities. By definition, that is a form of intolerance of the older kind, i.e., use of the coercive powers of the state to punish those who step outside the norms the state approves. Of course, these mayors could argue that Dan Cathy and those he influences or represents are trying to maintain or promote laws against those who practice homosexuality-for example, laws that refuse to assign the category of “marriage” to homosexual unions. In other words, conservatives no less than liberals want to use the powers of the state to exclude behavior of which they do not approve.

D. A. Carson is research professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois.

[1] D. A. Carson, The Intolerance of Tolerance (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012).

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