From a reader:
Jonah,
Remember when gay rights was supposedly all about “tolerance”? This is
more evidence that from the beginning, tolerance was only the means, with
unconditional acceptance always the end goal.
To tolerate something means that one agrees to put up with something that
he or she doesn’t particularly care for (cigarette smoking, loud obnoxious
music, conservative opinion, etc.) And more often than not the mental
mechanism used is to simply “tune out” the thing being tolerated. All of
which is to say that the basic attitudes you expressed reflect those of
toleration by any standard definition that I know. And Andrew cries outrage.