You Must Respect Misogyny!?

by Marc Neal

By now we’ve all heard about Kansas City Chief kicker Harrison Butker saying women should aspire to be homemakers, among other stereotypical and misogynistic tropes. He can hoist of his own petard, as Shakespeare said, I am not here to discuss him. I want to discuss what Whoopi Goldberg said in response to his speech. I agree with her-in part-but I think she confused two terms.

In speaking about his speech and whether he should be canceled, silenced, denounced, or whatever our term of the week is, Whoopi said while she disagreed with his beliefs and perspective, she supported his right to freedom of speech. She said she didn’t agree with him, but she respects him saying what he believes. Here is the meat of my blog today.

I don’t agree with Butker, nor do I respect him. I cannot respect someone who has views so divergent from my own. I cannot, will not, respect anyone who I view as backward, ignorant, and demeaning to other members of our society. What I will do is tolerate his existence and his right to freedom of speech. I will tolerate his being an idiot and allow him to be such. I believe Whoopi conflated respect and tolerate.

We often hear that we must respect someone’s rights. We must respect differences of opinion and beliefs. But to me, this is the wrong word to use for what we must do for all other people, especially ones who we view as having ignorant, or dangerous ideas. The word respect as defined by Oxford Language Dictionary means to have deep admiration, due regard for, or admire deeply someone or their ideas. How can we respect someone we totally disagree with? By telling people to respect others’ idiotic opinions, we create a dissonance.

“How can I hold deeply this person’s ideas, when I completely disagree with them?”

Changing the word respect with tolerance, changes the entire meaning and feeling around this situation. Oxford defines tolerance as “the ability or willingness to tolerate something, in particular the existence of opinions or behavior that one does not necessarily agree with. the capacity to endure continued subjection to something, especially a drug, transplant, antigen, or environmental conditions, without adverse reaction.”

Tolerance literally means to put up with. Something or someone we disagree with and have negative feelings about, without having any negative reaction. Tolerance means to “let others be”.

This is an important reminder as we navigate our social and cultural landscape, especially moving to this extremely pivotal and vital election. We must allow others to have whatever viewpoint they have developed, within legal limits of course, but we do not need to give one ounce of credibility or acceptance to them. To protect the marginalized and vulnerable members of our community we must be willing to be vigilant and aggressive, while still being cordial and loving, against bigotry and hate speech. We shouldn’t silence people like Harrison Butker or Laruen Boebert or even Donald Trump. We should allow them to speak. Then spend at much effort as necessary to rebut and counter their ignorance, stupidity, and hate with messages of inclusion, acceptance, and love. And who we cannot accept, we will tolerate.