Tolerance Means …

… something less than support.
(c) 2019, Davd

“Some of my best friends are Jewish” was once a stock denial of anti-Semitism. The parallel stock denial would be “Some of my best friends are [LGBTQ].” None of my best friends happen to be — but at least one good friend was homosexual, if the gossip I heard be true.

The friend I have in mind as I begin this blog is a mild-mannered, easygoing United Church organist, or was if he has “passed away” since we last met. He was reputed to be homosexual, and one reason I write “reputed” is that he never “made advances” of a sexual nature, in my direction. Our common interest was gardening; and it gave us many good hours together.

My best guess about his “sexual orientation”, and i explicitly designate it to be a guess, is that the repute, the gossip, was factually correct and “Gard”[ener] was indeed homosexual. “Gay”, he was on only one occasion I remember, when he played “For he’s a Jolly Good Fellow”, as their pastor announced his imminent retirement. Such gaiety is not homosexual… nor to my knowledge, was their Pastor.

“Gard”, was himself a gentle, mild-mannered, unmarried musician, living with his widowed mother, whose normal ways and manners were not lively enough to call “gay”. He knew the local climate, soils, and species rather well, and when I first arrived he taught me much that was valuable… never “gaily”.

I treated him as a fellow gardener in whom I had no erotic interest. If he had any erotic interest in me, “he hid it well.” I doubt he did have, I did not know who his homosexual playmate[s] might have been, if any. Supposing that he be homosexual, which I assumed on what evidence I knew, I tolerated that, which in practice meant, I treated him the same as if he weren’t. His homosexuality didn’t matter relative to our church and gardening interests.

Such be tolerance. It had no effect, no influence toward motivating me to “march in a Pride parade.” (To us Christians, the pride is usually a worse sin than the homosexuality. My attitude toward homosexual orientation is “Don’t act on it if you can discipline yourself¹: Abstain if you can. Indulge the impulses if you must. Flaunt it? NO.)

So why in Hell were Green leader May, NDP leader Singh, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau flaunting homosexual pride — possibly without even having homosexual nature? Do they really crave attention that badly? (Maybe so — they are politicians.)

When BBC News quoted PM Trudeau not long before the election call, as saying: “It’s just unfortunate that there are still some party leaders who want to be prime minister, who choose to stand with people who are intolerant instead of standing with the LGBT community,”

… the PM and Liberal Party leader was misusing the T-word. Tolerance means respecting the other qualities in a person, despite her or his homosexuality, or alcoholism, or whatever. Trudeau’s opponent Scheer is being more tolerant [and less proud! which is worthy of much blessing] of non heterosexual “orientations” than PM Trudeau was being of Scheer.

Y’ know, I read somewhere that Justin PM Trudeau was officially a Roman-Catholic in a Québec diocese. He ordered, did he not? that all Liberal candidates support abortion? Is abortion not a mortal sin in Roman-Catholicism?

Perhaps some bishop in Québec is being much too tolerant.

Notes:

1. As a divorced Christian, even as a victim rather than a perpetrator of the divorce, I have disciplined my heterosexual inclinations to the point of complete abstinence for more than 15 years. What I preach, I can say I’ve practiced.