Tolerance Has Never Come Naturally

Legal remedies coerce the hands but not the heart. Some may never wish to break bread with those whose conduct, though lawful, they find loathsome, whose beliefs they find heretical, whose message they think traitorous. And yet they are called upon to suffer them because that is who we are as a nation -- not a people bereft of private values but a people enriched by a stubborn willingness to endure each other. "Toleration is not merely a generous byproduct of the American system: it is its essential principle, " wrote Walter Lippmann.

The president's father said it best in his inaugural address: "A president is neither prince nor pope, and I don't seek a window on men's souls. In fact, I yearn for a greater tolerance, an easy-goingness about each other's attitudes and way of life."

Intolerance always has two victims, the object of prejudice and its carrier. Gay men and women have endured ostracism, ridicule and violence. But those who cannot bring themselves to face the notion of homosexuality also have paid dearly. Marriage, not the abstract "institution" so often cited, but the flesh and blood and spiritual variety, has already suffered. Families have torn themselves apart over how and whether to accept a gay child, and husbands and wives, joined in sham unions coerced by society's unwillingness to accept a person's true sexual identity, have produced misery and divorce.

Estimates of the number of gays in the population vary widely between 1 and 10 percent. But even if it were 3 percent, let's say, that translates as more than 8 million of our sons and daughters, co-workers and classmates. Bias is the burden borne by too much of the other 97 percent. (As Georgia mounts its legislative assault on gay marriages, it might consider that the nation's gay population probably exceeds that state's entire population. )

With intolerance, the real threat is never from without but from within. It is the canker that discomforts the nation, its families and its citizens. It creates an uncivil union that pits the love and commitment of some against the love and commitment of others. And here we are not just talking about same-sex marriages, but about any effort to marginalize our own fellow citizens.

True, "tolerance" is just a word, but as a verbal artifact it tells us something of who we were, who we are and who we may yet become. It teaches us that when we master our own misgivings about others, it is not they alone who are liberated but we ourselves, from the pain and discomfort of fear and prejudice. That is the modern meaning of tolerance.

Author's e-mail:tedgup@att.net

Ted Gup, who is researching the nature of discrimination with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship, is the Shirley Wormser Professor of Journalism at Case Western Reserve University.