Sir, – Further to Jennifer O'Connell's article "There should be no right to intolerance" (Life, April 6th), she says that the views of the US conservative right raise "troubling spectres" for US liberals. If so, it is also true that some US liberal positions upset the US right. If tolerance and equality are so important, then should it be all right to upset both sides?
Let us suppose someone objects to or supports something and that person does not deny anyone else the right to hold a view contrary to their own. Let us suppose that someone agrees or refuses to bake a cake, supply flowers, or vote for a message contrary to their own belief.
Why should they be criticised or prosecuted? Surely that is intolerant of their right to hold their own belief?
This is not a debate about the right to be intolerant. It is about much more than that. This is a debate about the right, based on one’s convictions, to hold a contrary viewpoint to either the liberal or conservative viewpoint or any other.
This essentially intolerant contradiction is the flaw at the foundation of Ms O’Connell’s argument. – Yours, etc,
JOHN CRONIN,
Terenure,
Dublin 6W.
Sir, – Jennifer O’Connell has this to say of the demands for freedom of conscience in matter of same-sex marriage: “But this isn’t a debate about cake, or even a debate about rights. It is a debate about a single right: the right to be intolerant.”
If this is a debate about the right to be intolerant, please mark me down as an ardent supporter of that right. Can tolerance really be considered tolerance, anyway, if it is state-enforced? And who is to decide what counts as intolerance?
Her allusion to Karl Popper is entirely inappropriate. Karl Popper was writing about the threat to freedom by supporters of totalitarianism, not about florists and bakers who are being pressured into supporting something they cannot in conscience acknowledge. What threat are such people to anybody’s freedom? Who is the aggressor here?
To paraphrase Ms O’Connell, this isn’t a debate about equality, or intolerance, or rights. It’s a debate about freedom – and the zealots for same-sex marriage seem utterly intolerant of the idea that anyone can be free to disagree with them. – Yours, etc,
MAOLSHEACHLANN
Ó CEALLAIGH,
Dublin 11.
Sir, – In her celebration of the possibility that the Irish electorate might give approval to same-sex marriage, Jennifer O’Connell calls for denying tolerance to the intolerant; that is, to those who support the traditional concept of marriage as being between partners of the opposite sex.
One wonders if her tolerance would extend to supporting a possible future referendum not limiting marriages to just two partners. Such marriages exist now, and in the past, in many other cultures. Approval could be interpreted as a manifestation of Ireland’s embrace of multiculturalism. – Yours, etc,
JOHN P McCARTHY,
Professor Emeritus
of History,
Fordham University,
New York.