On Tolerance

Recent events in my life have forced me to reexamine my life - more specifically, to reexamine the spiritual lessons that have come my way time and time again. Sometimes I heed the lessons the first time, and I save myself a lot of grief. Sometimes it takes two or three kicks of the mule for me to get the message. I'm sure there are some that I may not learn until my next lifetime.

But there's one message that keeps popping back into my life: tolerance. Yeah, tolerance is an easy thing to talk about among friends - who doesn't believe in being tolerant of others? But I find myself increasingly growing intolerant of people who are not tolerant of me.

Case in point: I made my obligatory appearance at my mother's church for Mother's Day yesterday, a task that believe you me, is no small feat. In the opening passages of the speaker's sermon, he immediately set me off when he said that the purpose of marriage is the family - and threw in the word "heterosexual" in the mix, for good measure.

Needless to say, that did not go over well with me.

Discussing this issue with my father, I was told that "tolerance goes both ways" and that if I want people to be tolerant of me, then I must be tolerant of others. It's a message that chafes me in my core. In my heart, I'm a warrior. How does a warrior live life without finding some things intolerable? Especially those who are intolerant of him?

It forced me to think deeply. Are there things that are just "intolerable" by nature, or is it all relative to the person or situation? And shouldn't we all agree that intolerance is intolerable?

Except we all don't. The religious right have no compunction about expressing intolerance of LGBT people, even going so far as to put a separation in their minds between the person and the orientation ("I don't hate you, I hate your homosexuality!") as if that's a sane or logical position. Try it in another context: "I don't hate you, I hate that you're black!"

It's a question that I think I will be struggling with forever: is everything tolerable, or are there things that we cannot tolerate lest we become a country we don't even recognize anymore?