As Charlene Haddock Seigfried notes, "[p]ragmatists tend to celebrate otherness by seeking out and welcoming difference as an expression of creative subjectivity" (1996, 267).
Pragmatists, she says, "are more likely to emphasize that everyone is a significantly and valuably Other … and tend to celebrate otherness by seeking out and welcoming difference as an expression of creative subjectivity" (1996, 267).
Because a society that's not just tolerant, but welcoming, of differences — differences between spouses, differences among children and parents, differences at work, at school and on the playground — is a society that's easier for everyone to live in.
Sullivan may have been overly optimistic in a 2005 article that he wrote for The New Republic, welcoming the receding differences between gay and straight, but he was the first to fully articulate the assimilation of gay identity into the mainstream.
In the book Gender Intelligence by Barbara Annis and Keith Merron, the authors write about the journey of gender-intelligent companies, highlighting companies that make the transformation from gender equity to the powerful objective of welcoming the natural difference between women and men.
They found that New Yorkers were "far more accepting and welcoming" than Angelenos -- a difference they attribute to the two regions' immigration patterns and histories.
Does this mean that America's political system and voters are more open and welcoming to difference of all kinds?
Many organizations today are making concerted efforts to become not only more demographically diverse but also more inclusive and welcoming of difference.
According to Ed Kessler of the Woolf Institute, which established the commission, British society had "changed beyond all recognition in two generations... Public policy needs, as a matter of urgency, to be overhauled to be much more pluralistic and much more welcoming of difference".
For example, the authors state that: "Many organizations today are making concerted efforts to become not only more demographically diverse but also more inclusive and welcoming of difference.
