Tolerance: putting up with other people’s crap

Yesterday Blazing Cat Fur highlighted an article by a prickly anti-Christian academic intolerantly belly-aching about having to put up with all the symbols of Christmas.

Today Lorne Gunter addresses the phenomenon:

Every year at about this time, there is a new batch of news stories detailing how the forces of political correctness and atheism are attempting to stamp out all public references to Christmas.

... The culprits are most often anti-Christians -- people of little or no faith who have grown tired of all the jollity and goodwill this time of year.

... A lot of modern rights advocates have convinced themselves that tolerance means agreement and affirmation, not merely acceptance.

... Tolerance means exactly putting up with all the Christmas crap and Hanukkah crap and Kwanza crap and even atheist crap, so that others will put up with whatever crap is your crap, too.

... The notion that these campaigns are altruistic efforts to shelter sensitive non-Christians from the theological imperialism of the dominant culture around them is just the latest excuse the intolerant minority is using to impose its own secular theology on the rest of us.

The rest.