The "narrow line between asking not to be treated with contempt and asking to be positively valued."

"The demand for recognition almost always arises when an ethnic, linguistic, or religious minority feels that it is being treated with contempt.  It is the demand for respect.  But there is a narrow line between asking not to be treated with contempt and asking to be positively valued. . . . Since toleration is one thing and respect another, the demand for recognition asks for more than toleration; it asks for approval, perhaps even for assistance in keeping such subcultures alive.  But why would a liberal state do that?  Toleration is quite enough. . . ."
". . . as he did in the Dred Scott case, Lincoln drew the line at any suggestion that free Americans should acknowledge the legitimacy of slavery.
     "Here is where Bromwich's opposition to the 'politics of recognition' finds its historical roots; it might be necessary to tolerate slavery, but it was impossible to accord it moral recognition."

     Alan Ryan, "The good patriots," a review of Moral imagination, by David Bromwich (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2014), The New York review of books 62, no. 5 (March 19, 2015):  38, 40 (37-40).
     Couple that with the comment "Liberal societies are better than totalitarian societies, but liberals are no less afflicted with the taint of Original Sin than the rest of humanity" (40), as well as the equal opportunity flogging that Obama gets, and one begins to hope that Ryan and Bromwich might actually possess the "moral imagination" to at least tolerate the insertion of "sexual" after "religious" in that first paragraph.