Tolerance is a Treaty.🔷

You cannot compromise with someone who advocates genocide. There is no middle ground to be found with a person who denies the personhood of other human beings. There is no situation in which a little bit of enforced ethnic purity is acceptable. This is not a negotiable stance.

We may tolerate this hateful rhetoric, and indeed we have, for generations. We’ve tolerated their despicable stance because we’re a nation of laws, and the protection of law must be afforded even to scum if law is expected to function. This tolerance is an acknowledgement by those of us who believe in free democratic discourse, that suppressing any voices — even those who seek to destroy free thought — would undermine that freedom.

Tolerance does not mean that we should allow them to operate without consequence, however!

We can’t forget that tolerance is a one-sided gift given to ignorant barbarians by the enlightened, and endured with pain. They enjoy this gift at our pleasure, because we’re well aware that there would be no reciprocity. Given the slightest opportunity, they will seek to destroy everything we hold dear.

When they go forth to spread hate with the freedom we’ve given them, they will naturally face censure from their communities (families, employers, etcetera). When they inevitably suffer predictable repercussions, these abominable people will scream “Intolerance! Discrimination!”

They’ll ask, perhaps as they sagely stroke their chins: “what happened to that tolerance you preach? I spoke my mind and I lost my job! Aren’t you supposed to be the enlightened ones?”

They’ll be studiously missing the point, however. They won’t ask this question because they expect you to accept their hate without question; they’ll ask this because they want to use the necessity of tolerance in an enlightened society as a weapon to destroy free thought.

They’ll ask, again and again, “why is your stance the only acceptable one?” as if we’ve claimed this; though we never have, though we’ve allowed them to repeat their carbon-copied bigotry, again and again, since the dawn of the enlightenment era.

They will ask these questions because they believe our benevolence is weakness, and because they believe us to be as unprincipled as they are. They don’t ask these these things because they believe they’re facing unfair discrimination, but because they hope to destroy free expression by questioning our resolve.

They ask these questions to fog the minds of young men who have a deficit of impulse control and a surplus of rage. They spread this uncertainty and doubt, this miasma of hate, knowing full well that someone will act. When that happens, they’ll have more chin stroking and pointed questions. “Shouldn’t they have stayed out of the road? What about their behavior? Obviously they’re just as violent as us!” They’ll say these things again and again, as if they were true — until the vulnerable people they target begin to accept them as fact. Their useful, angry idiots will murder us, and they’ll go on to blame us for our suffering.

This is not our fault. These rage-puppets are not persecuted, they do not face discrimination. They are simply, continuously, trying to craft a false reality in which our tolerance implies that believing a person’s birth can make them a non-person is as valid as any well reasoned opinion based on verifiable facts.

Our tolerance does not require to us accept the violence of the intolerant. It does not require us to remain undefended when bigots threaten us.

Our tolerance does not require us to remain silent when hate mongers tell us that we don’t have a right to exist. They are wrong. We must remind them that they are wrong, and we must stand together to support each other against their fusillade of cruelty.

Freedom to speak without government censure or prosecution does not protect the intolerant from the consequences of preaching their doctrine in an open forum. If you tell your peers that they don’t deserve to exist, or that they aren’t worthwhile because of how they were born, our laws do not protect you from the natural tendency of the community to reject you.
Freedom of speech does not extend to incitement. It does not offer legal protection when you call for violence, or when you act on your rhetoric.

Freedom of speech is not a free pass to do whatever you want without consequence, and our tolerance should never be expected to extend too acceptance.

Never forget this: tolerance is a treaty. We will tolerate their hate, for the greater good — so long as it doesn’t translate into action. Remember, however, that our treaty does not require us to sit idly by as they tread upon and openly mock our permissiveness. Speak your mind; tell them they’re wrong, and that you do not accept their hate.

We’ll continue to permit them to say the very things that will mark them for exile from free society, and when some of them act upon their words, we mustn’t hesitate to wield the harsher side of the rule of law. Even this, for the bigot who seeks to categorize and destroy, is a kindness — but a kindness that will demonstrate our resolute dedication to reason and liberty.🔷