Popper's Paradox: Does America Have a Duty to Tolerate That Which Threatens It

As someone who looks at culture and politics regularly, I often write about problems and on occasion, proffer solutions. Sometimes the solutions are relatively straightforward and obvious, like suggesting to the GOP that if they don’t pass the SAVE Act and bring about something resembling honest elections they’re going to get their asses handed to them in November.   Others, I recognize, are far more complex than my 30,000 foot take on the issue. This is most certainly the case when I suggested the government should get out of the wealth redistribution business. Knowing that there are thousands of programs handing out trillions of dollars annually, just suggesting the government should get out of the business of taking money from Peter to give to Paul seems a bit trite.  And it might be, but trying to explain a problem and proffer a detailed solution in under 1200 words is a bit challenging, at least it is for me. 

But that doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop highlighting issues and making suggestions. 

One of the most important and challenging issues from both a cultural and political perspective is tolerance. What should we tolerate?  How much of it should we tolerate?  And, perhaps most importantly, what should be not tolerate… and why.

For years I’ve struggled with the idea of limits on tolerance, but didn’t really have a definition for it.  I do now. I recently saw a post that referred to Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance, something with which I was unfamiliar. I looked it up and immediately recognized it as the perfect distillation of exactly what had been running through my head, basically: Does society have a duty to be tolerant to that which seeks to destroy said society?

For a long time, America clearly understood the answer was no. The obvious example is Communism. America knew that Communism was a threat and Congress did what it could to thwart the party and extinguish the idea itself. Under the Smith Act (Alien Registration Act of 1940), it became illegal to act “with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of any such government, prints, publishes, edits, issues, circulates, sells, distributes, or publicly displays any written or printed matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence…”

The party was outlawed and leaders were thrown in jail, and while being a Communist wasn’t technically illegal, just being one could get you fired or blacklisted, both in Hollywood and beyond.  Eventually the Supreme Court, in Yates v. United States (1957), narrowed Smith, ruling that abstract advocacy of revolution or teaching doctrine was protected by the First Amendment. Only advocacy directed at inciting imminent illegal action could be punished. 

Today Communism is tolerated in America, and sadly, celebrated even. Indeed, it’s basically merged with the Democrat party and their love child has just been elected as mayor of New York. And the reality is, the Democrat party of 2026 is far more of a danger to the Republic than the Communists ever were.

The merger actually dovetails with the primary subject of this piece on tolerance:  Islam. 

Our 1^st Amendment guarantees Americans freedom of religion. Indeed, it’s literally the very first right protected in the Bill of Rights: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”

There is no definition in the Constitution or anywhere else in government however that states exactly what a religion is.  In truth, religion in America encompasses everything from traditional Catholicism, reformed Judaism and thousands of Protestant sects to the late Heaven’s Gate cult and being a conscientious objector!

Perhaps nothing else demonstrates the reality that America is, in a word, tolerant. 

But are there limits to that tolerance? And should those limits apply to Islam?

I’d like to suggest that there should be, and yes they should apply to Islam.

The reality is, while Islam is most certainly a religion, it is also something else. It is a theology of conquest and subjugation. From its very beginning Islam was about conquering and conquest, through any means necessary, including deception. 

On a daily basis we hear Muslim “scholars” and others speak in the streets, on college campuses and online among other places, telling us that Islam will basically take over.  Even in high schools they are welcomed to proffer Sharia. 

And that gets to the crux of the problem.  At its very core, Islam is incompatible with western civilization.  It does not believe in freedom of speech. It does not believe in freedom of religion.  Women are 2^nd class citizens and non-Muslim women fare even worse. 

All of this might just be an exercise navel gazing, if it were not so deadly. Since 9/11 there have been more than 64,000 Islamic terrorist attacks around the world.  Most were actually in Muslim countries, particularly those with American troops on the ground. But not all.  Here in the United States, since 1994 there have been a total of 740 Islamic terrorist attacks or plots disrupted while in Europe between 1994 and 2021 that number was 367.   

But it’s not just naval gazing. Across Europe, they’re seeing what happens when Muslims reach just 5% of the population. In France over half of young Muslims want Sharia law, in Austria a court made Sharia legal, while in the UK Muslim rape rings were allowed to rape thousands of young white girls for more than a decade because the authorities were scared of being called racists. Indeed across Europe Muslims are rapidly increasing in numbers and not only are they not assimilating, they are bringing unprecedented rates of violent crime across the continent.  Here at home Muslims gather in large groups tell us they are taking over, something they have explicitly wanted to do for over 30 years! 

And so back to my original question: Does society have a duty to be tolerant to that which seeks to destroy said society?  Is Islam to be tolerated? If yes, ask yourself, is there a “religion” that might ever NOT be tolerated? What tenants might it have that are not present in Islam?  What kinds of activities would its adherents have to engage in that have not been so by Muslims?

Our Constitution was written as a vehicle for preserving the fundamental ideas of limited government, free speech, freedom of religion and individual liberty. A creed that explicitly targets those simply cannot be tolerated. 

This is one of those problems for which solutions would take far more 1200 words to cover.  Whatever solutions are to be had, they must start with recognizing that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. 

Gay Wedding Cakes, Religious Freedom and the Return of Slavery in America

The most common definition of a slave is: A person who is the property of and wholly subject to another. There is another definition however: A person entirely under the domination of some influence or person. Slavery has been outlawed in the US for 150 years, but some people want to bring it back… but not necessarily in the form you might think. Uncle Sam of course is not a master and citizens are not his slaves. The government – at least not the government defined in the Constitution – doesn’t have the right to tell Americans who they have to work for or who their businesses have to serve.

It can however, at least according to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, demand that businesses that offer to provide services to the public not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. That means however that if you are offering to sell cakes, you must not decide that you will sell cakes to men and not women, to Jews but not Christians, to blacks but not whites, or to a native born American but not a naturalized citizen born in Canada.

Interestingly, other than religion all of the limitations are innate, things that people are born with or had from birth. That prohibition also applies to the later characteristics defined by the Americans with Disabilities Act. The CRA says what a business can’t do, it can’t discriminate based on a clear set of criteria… but it says nothing about what they must do. A black chef can’t legally refuse to provide service to someone who walks in simply because he’s white. He can however choose not to provide service to him when the man tells him that the event is a celebration of KKK history. That’s discrimination, but it’s legal discrimination and its well within the chef’s rights.

The CRA lists specific criteria upon which a business is not allowed to discriminate: race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. But that’s it. Other than those reasons any business can choose who they would like to serve. A 7-11 store is well within its rights to say “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service”. By the same token a gun store can choose not to sell a gun to a drunk person and business can choose not to hire people with tattoos. A community can limit its inhabitants to those over 55 or a storekeeper with a Napoleon complex can choose to never serve customers over 6 ft. These restrictions may or may not be prudent, but none of them are illegal as businesses have the right to choose to whom they provide services within the framework of the CRA, the ADA and the Equal Protection Clause upon which both are based.

Which brings us to the issue of bakers and photographers and others. The question is, working under the shadow of the Equal Protection Clause, do such businesses have the right to refuse to provide services for a gay wedding, something their faith tells them is a sin? Absolutely. Do they have the right to refuse to provide services for a gay wedding? Absolutely. Should they be protected from lawsuits for doing so? Of course.

The point is, in almost every one of these cases the service providers did not refuse service because someone was gay. Rather, they declined to participate in an activity their faith tells them is sinful. Indeed the baker in the case actually offered to let the gay couple purchase any one of the cakes in his shop. He was simply refusing to bake a gay themed wedding cake.

The distinction between the activity and a customer’s gayness or lack thereof may be a fine one, but it is an important one. The CRA says businesses cannot discriminate against customers based on various innate or unchangeable characteristics. Significantly, the characteristic of being gay is not among them. Which means that theoretically businesses have the right to discriminate against gays or 22 year olds or journalists with no threat of government sanction. Nonetheless, most Americans oppose discriminating against people for their sexual orientation and the businesses in question were not doing so. (Similarly, 85% of Americans believe service providers should be allowed to decline to participate in gay weddings.)  They were simply declining to participate in an activity that their faith says is sinful.

The jilted couples in these cases looked to the government to force the said businesses to provide the services they wanted. In all three cases the government obliged stating that the religious objections of the business owners were trumped by the couple’s equal protections. That is both unfortunate and absurd. If the government can force a Christian baker to bake a cake for a gay couple, can it force a Muslim grocer who does special orders to special order pork? Can it compel the aforementioned black chef to cater the KKK’s event? Can it force a vegan landlord to rent his building to someone wanting to open a steakhouse? The answer of course is no, no and no and the reason is because Americans are not slaves and the government has no right to compel them to do things that go against their moral convictions.

That is likely news to people in government (and their liberal enablers) who believe they are the masters of the American people. They are not. Americans are free and by constitution they have given government limited powers – even if the government is increasingly obliterating those limits. Of those freedoms,  religious freedom is among the most important.  It is what brought the Pilgrims to America 400 years ago and it’s been a hallmark of American society ever since. A government commanding its citizens to do things beyond its scope is never a good idea, which Obamacare demonstrates on a daily basis. A government commanding its citizens to do something that goes against their religious faith is even worse because it undermines the fundamental legitimacy of the government itself. If these rulings stand, if the most basic freedom to abstain from participating in activities your religion tells you are sinful is now largely gone, then the progressive barbarians are no longer at the gate… they’ve entered your home, taken control of your life and have carte blanche to force you to do whatever it is they demand – or face ruinous consequences otherwise. Such is the kindling with which revolutionary fires are often started…