When it comes to tolerance, choice, and diversity some lefties only find some choices and some diversity tolerable. If we're tolerating sexual heterodoxy or various marital permutations or the choice to kill the child in one's womb that's all just peachy, but if we're talking about choice and diversity in education and religion then the voteries of tolerance suddenly transmogrify into Robespierres.
Consider this example of left-wing tolerance from the pen of Darwinian atheist P.Z. Myers:
"I do wish we could arrest all those parents who use homeschooling as an excuse to keep their children ignorant."
Nice. No doubt if parents persisted in home-schooling their children despite having been arrested, Myers would have them carted off to Madame Guillotine.
Having taught lots of home-schooled children at the college level I can say that they're just as well-educated in all important respects as those who matriculate through most of our public schools. If Myers wants to arrest people for child abuse he should turn his attention to the people responsible for the sorry state of many of the public schools in this country.
But it's not education people like Myers are really concerned about. It's religious education that has their shorts in a wedgy. If the public schools aren't teaching kids history, literature, writing, and math that can be overlooked as long as they're indoctrinating them in materialist science and philosophy.
What cannot be permitted is the circumvention by homeschoolers of the materialist indoctrination students receive in many government schools. Escaping that indoctrination would be a crime in any world in which P.Z. Myers had any influence because, as Richard Dawkins asserts in The God Delusion, it's a form of child abuse.
RLC
