I’ve been struggling with the issue of tolerance lately. Tolerance is an absolutely essential part of my personal moral code; I was raised to be tolerant and to value tolerance, and I consider it a necessary part of being a decent human being. But I have to admit that I am not very tolerant of…well, you know. The extreme right wing, the fundies, the wingnuts. (Let’s just refer to them as “those people,” to turn one of their nasty little code-word phrases back on them.) It’s a passive sort of intolerance, which is the only kind I’m capable of, really: I’m just not interested in a two-sided conversation with them, I don’t want to hear their opinions, and I wish they would all just go away and take a few US states with them.
Oh, on a one-on-one level, I’m as tolerant as I have to be, of course; with my fundie co-workers at my last job, for example, I just avoided all topics that might cause controversy, and as a result, we all got along fine and I knew them to be essentially decent people, just horribly misguided in some of their beliefs. But on a broader scale, I am not tolerant of those people, and I don’t feel as bad about it as I maybe should. After all, if tolerance is so important to me, shouldn’t I take a live-and-let-live attitude toward them instead of wanting to put them all on a boat that sails around the world for all eternity? And if I don’t take that attitude, then aren’t I guilty of the same sort of intolerance as they are, just with a smaller target zone?
Yet I can’t seem to make myself feel any more tolerant of them than I already don’t (to use one of my husband’s cleverly twisted locutions). So when I read this in Salon this morning, I felt both better and worse about the subject: better, because it’s hard to feel terribly guilty about loathing someone who can publicly express such an abhorrent sentiment, and worse, because the quote makes me feel even more intolerant (though I can honestly say that I stop short of being able to apply that same abhorrent sentiment to, y’know, those people).