05/28/2026
In the wake of the controversy surrounding the New York Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart’s praise of President Trump, there’s a huge mistake that continues to make the rounds in the rhetoric on the religious right.
People keep saying that progressives are hypocritical because they preach tolerance yet don’t tolerate opposing viewpoints, otherwise they wouldn’t have any issues with what Jaxson Dart says and does. Free speech, am I right?
So let’s clear this up:
First, the goal for progressives is not “tolerance.” The goal for progressives is justice, equity, and dignity.
Progressives protest policies — not necessarily persons — that are intolerant toward others: policies that take life, rather than give life (i.e., policies that perpetuate patriarchy, racism, cishet normativity, economic injustice, etc.).
If our society is tolerant of policies that destroy life, then we serve gods of death. The commitment progressives make is to the flourishing of life and sometimes that means protesting policies that take life rather than give life.
This isn’t hard to see — just think about protests down through the years that were unequivocally intolerant of slavery, or women being denied the right to vote, or Jim Crow laws. The ethical integrity of each of these movements was directly linked to the level of intolerance for slavery, patriarchy, and racism.
In these situations, being tolerant of slavery, patriarchy, and Jim Crow were the worst ethical positions possible, not the best.
This really isn’t hard to see.
Tolerance is the lowest common denominator and basically means that you can speak your mind without fear of arrest or danger to your life.
But it doesn’t mean for one second that the value of your beliefs must be accepted, or that the import of your policies should go unchecked.
Especially when support for such policies is precisely what leads other lives (Black lives, women’s lives, LGBTQ+ lives, migrant lives, non-white lives, etc.) to be in danger.
Also? If the MAGA world wants to celebrate the right for NFL QBs to speak their minds, I’m all for it.
Just be sure to extend the same courtesy to Colin Kaepernick.
-phil
