On Tolerance

Note: this one has been edited until it disappeared.

I wrote over a thousand words on the specific case of Phil Robertson from A&E's Duck-something getting fired for calling homosexuality a sin. I wrote a list of all the books in the Bible that call homosexuality sinful and prescribe various retributions for it. I wrote about how what we call tolerance isn't really tolerance at all. Our society really sucks at tolerance so I think it's weird we use it to describe our awkward, unsteady, and continuously evolving pluralism. I think it's really weird that it is one of the central reasons most people will give for our society being, in some way, "good". But we are really awful at it. We don't know what tolerance is (in terms of our society) or what it would look like if we actually practiced it. The closest we can get is a long list of words you aren't supposed to use without looking around you to see if anyone to whom that word might apply is in earshot. It's the long list of words for straight white able-bodied and good looking Christians because they are the only ones who aren't going to be insulted by any of the words on the list. That should give you an idea of precisely how many people are tolerating and how many are being tolerated. It should also give an indication of how well all this tolerance is going.

If you leave something in the hands of the handsome, male, straight, reasonably young, Christian guys you should expect it to be completely fucked up and the way our society tolerates is no exception. As one of the people who are tolerating far more than I am being tolerated (although I am a free-loader, a leech on the system, a useless mouth, a do-nothing, a bum) I can tell you just how awful we are at it. I can tell you how thin that tolerance is and how it is limited to "words we agree not to use (in public)" and doesn't include one damn thing more. But I erased the whole post because when I read it again it was way too close to defending hate speech because no one is attacking the actual hate. And the latter doesn't make the former ok.

I think our society has a long way to go before we begin to approach the ideal of the genuinely tolerant and pluralistic community we currently hold ourselves to be. What I wrote wasn't helpful. I apologize to the one person this blog's counter says read it. Everyone else can piss off. Merry Christmas.