i just like being around boys. being gay has nothing to do with my sexual urges

Mr. Howland: no parents of young boys (and this includes homosexual dads) can — assuming they possess integrity and common sense — seriously favor homosexual scout masters for little boys. It’s an impossibility.

I’m not sure that Mr. Kalb’s appeal to a truly consistent embrace of diversity would convince Carrier Air-Conditioning Corporation to be tolerant of the diversity of those who disapprove of homosexual scout masters. Diversity doesn’t actually mean the equal diversity of every single thing. It means liberating society from discriminatory standards that are based on a belief in some higher or exclusive truth. As I wrote in my article, http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=5423, the inversions of morality by which, for example, society condemns people who try to protect children from child molesters,

“are the logical consequence of the central credo of modern liberalism: that all intolerance and discrimination must be eliminated. In a society dedicated to that proposition, the good itself must ultimately be seen as evil, because the good discriminates against evil, while evil must be blessed with victim status, because it is excluded by the good.”

Thus, to modern liberals, moral disapproval of homosexuality is not just one more diverse perspective to be included equally among other perspectives, it is a perspective that says there is a right and a wrong, and thus in principle is opposed to diversity. Therefore it must be excluded. To the liberals such exclusion does not represent a double standard, because the position that is being included, homosexual liberation, does NOT posit an exclusive moral hierarchy but says that everything is equal. The position that is being excluded, traditional morality, DOES posit a moral hierarchy. Since traditional morality and homosexual liberation do not belong to the same class of phenomena, it is not a double standard to exclude the first and celebrate the second.

To continue the previous comment, I’m not saying that the liberal double standard cannot be identified and opposed. I’m saying it cannot be identified and opposed from within the framework of liberalism itself, which is what conservatives do when they appeal to liberals for a more consistent application of tolerance and diversity.

Liberalism claims to stand for the neutral equal inclusion of all values, while in reality (as Mr. Kalb showed in The Tyranny of Liberalism) it includes some values and excludes others. This is indeed a double standard, but it can only be seen as such from a point of view that stands outside liberalism. As liberals themselves see it, they are battling oppression, and so there is no inconsistency in, say, including homosexual scout masters while excluding the Boy Scouts, or in defending Third-World tyrants while demonizing the U.S. President. It is only from within a non-liberal perspective, which believes in objective morality and is loyal to a particular society, that a true scheme of values can be enunciated and the liberal double standard resisted.

It doesn’t seem likely that the Carrier Air-Conditioning Corporation is run by principled liberals or people who are interested in profound arguments of any kind. So the best I could think of doing was in effect to suggest that the rhetoric of “diversity” and “inclusiveness” has its problems, and can’t possibly use those words in their common-sense meaning. You have to start somewhere.