A fine essay on tolerance, and how it’s never an easy process — nor one that magically happens without pushing the envelope.
It bears reminding that for most, tolerance in its first stages is a laying down of arms, not an extending of hands. Like democracy itself, it is not about enjoying harmonies but about enduring dissonance. It does not, at least initially, create community, but rather sets forth a kind of DMZ — a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” writ large — in which differences are no longer deemed a casus belli or justification for discrimination.
Tolerance begins as an exercise in forbearance, a gritting of teeth. It is how we deal with each other’s differences. Talk of religious conviction and threats to marriage, earnest though it may be, does not account for the deep visceral reaction underlying the current opposition to same-sex marriages. For that, one must go back to the earlier meaning of tolerance, and the anguish suffered when confronted with differences that appear as abominations and therefore are threatening. Our responses are tribal, our lexicon rife with words expressing aversion and suspicion. Only with time does the alien become the immigrant, the stranger the neighbor, the outsider the newcomer.
Good stuff. Thanks, Les.