The week

That’s why the premier liberal virtue is toleration and not recognition. Toleration is perfectly compatible with — indeed, it presupposes — a lack of unanimity, or even majority consensus, about ultimate goods. It leaves the diversity of views about ultimate goods intact, forcing consensus on as few issues as possible, so that people belonging to specific regions, classes, ethnicities, and sociocultural and religious groups can build rich, meaningful lives together in freedom.

That’s recognition’s goal: to stamp out rival visions of the good when they stand in the way of unconditional acceptance.

And that brings me to the sloppy way the most strident gay-marriage proponents have been throwing around the term “bigotry.” A bigot is someone closed-minded in some respects — someone who evaluates or judges certain groups of people on the basis of prejudice, or pre-judgment, about them, who does not greet all people and ways of life with complete and unbiased openness. Someone, in other words, who does not grant automatic recognition and unconditional affirmation to everyone.

Dreher follows contra Sullivan