Reply #8: Try This Article...

[mermaid]

while I tend to have the knee-jerk reaction of no tolerance for them, either...try reading this article for a different perspective from the Unitarian Universalist publication UUWorld.
See what you think.
I think some good points are made, but I still tend to agree with your thought of "give 'em hell!"

But I thought another perspective on this...from a liberal religious viewpoint, might be interesting.

http://www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/competingworldviewsoffundamentalistsreligiousliberals1716.shtml

From the article...(Click on above link for full article)

Like most religious liberals, we Unitarian Universalists imagine ourselves to be nice people. It is those in the Christian Right, we believe, who want to force their moral code on everyone else and use public resources to proselytize for their faith. We, on the other hand, believe in tolerance, free choice, and letting people be what they have to be. What’s so scary about that? If the rank-and-file of organizations like Focus on the Family or the Christian Coalition feel threatened by us, we think, it can only be because they have been duped by their unscrupulous leaders.

Not necessarily.

True, preachers of the Christian Right have said a lot of unfair things about liberals, both religious and political. But conservative Christian fears have not been created ex nihilo. As overstated as those fears may at times become, they have a basis, and we would do well to understand it.

Such a call for understanding, I realize, will sound to some like an invitation to surrender. Won’t opponents see our empathy as a sign of weakness and be encouraged to make even bigger demands on us? If they make to comparable effort to understand and accommodate us, won’t we be drawn into one-sided compromises that slide gradually towards capitulation? In the face of a hard and uncompromising opponent, we seem to have no choice other than to become hard and uncompromising too. Only one strategy seems to make sense: Give them hell.

But liberal religious traditions recognize understanding as a source of strength, not a sign of weakness. “Give them not hell,” advised Universalist pioneer John Murray, “but hope and courage.” What if he was on to something? If our traditions of wisdom, empathy, and respect are simply baggage in this struggle, then we are at a significant disadvantage. We must find a way to use these tools and not just lug them around until our situation improves.