Mosque flap tests limits of Americans’ tolerance

Associated Press

The word “tolerance” comes from the Latin tolerare — to bear. In our dictionaries, we define it as, among other things, the “freedom from bigotry or prejudice.”

Its meanings are almost as numerous as the people who express them, as recent entries in the visitor comment book at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles suggest.

It means “to respect other races even if u hate them,” says one commenter, signed only as G. “Acceptance,” says another, Alejandra, adding, “To me, tolerance is tinged with the negative aspect of ‘putting up with’ someone or something but not fully embracing it.”

As rancor swirls around the issue of whether a mosque and Islamic cultural center should be built two blocks from the New York site where the destroyed twin towers stood, Americans are being forced to examine just how tolerant they are — or are not.

The issue always has been with us. Against the backdrop of Puritan rigidity and the infamous Salem witch trials, the Founding Fathers made sure the concept of tolerance was woven into the very fabric of the young American republic.

If that promise remains part of the nation’s creed today, it’s still true that disputes such as that involving the New York mosque test the limits of that tolerance.

“We were never as tolerant as we thought we were,” says the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “I think that the rock on which tolerance is built is often more like sandstone than it is granite. It is easy to erode at any times when problems in the culture develop.”

Although not declaring his outright support for the mosque planners’ real estate choice, President Barack Obama has defended their constitutional right to be there.

Not everyone was satisfied with his words.

“I think to reason in that manner is to shortchange American identity; it’s not to apprehend fully the robustness of American identity,” says Brad Stetson, co- author of the book “The Truth About Tolerance: Pluralism, Diversity And The Culture Wars.”

America’s “penchant for toleration,” as Stetson puts it, is “beyond question.” But he says that tolerance has always been “circumscribed by some understanding of what was best for the commonweal, the health of the social body.”

“It’s not necessarily intolerant to say no,” says Stetson, who also lectures at Chapman University and California State University, Long Beach. “Governing bodies at various levels of a deeply pluralistic society like ours have a duty to consider the range of public sensibilities ... a given decision affects, and not merely reflexively grant the naked exercise of rights upon request.SDRq