You can read the story here: a controversial play portraying Jesus and his apostles as openly gay has outraged a small Texas town.  The college hosting the performance, Tarleton State University, has defended the director, student John Jordan Otte, who says the production is designed to "bring people together" and show that "tolerance" and "unconditional love" are the hallmarks of true religion.

I'll refrain from commenting on the delusion inherent in that statement.

Instead, I want to focus for a minute on the way that a gross misrepresentation of "tolerance" has contributed to the degeneration of society as a whole.

Most Americans, when asked to give their thoughts on "tolerance," would readily admit that it's something we need more of. America is, after all, the icon of inter-religious, inter-racial and inter-ideological tolerance for other countries around the world. And you can never have too much of a good thing, right?

Real tolerance is a good thing; but it's a qualified good. In other words, it's a good thing that acquires its value not automatically, but in relation to the other attitudes and realities it is concerned with. And this is something modern culture fails to grasp.

As much as contemporary American society is rooted in and defined by it's "tolerant" outlook, the simple fact is that such a basis is a far cry from what the Founding Fathers ever envisioned for our country. Rather than tolerance for tolerance's sake (a modern American "virtue"), the reality is that our country was established firmly and unapologetically upon the deeper, unshakable bedrock of truth as it really exists. For the Founding Fathers, to be tolerant was to examine truth itself, wherever it was present, and to accept that truth for the goodness it made known.

Today, on the other hand, "tolerance" is a manufacturer of truth. Instead of investigating reasonable goods and weighing them against one another rationally (a classical application of real tolerance), many Americans today understand the word to mean nothing more than determining, by some deeply personal act of judgment, that some reality is equally as good as another. In short, "tolerance" in the contemporary vocabulary is tantamount to blind acceptance; and it has lost all trace of a rational basis.

This is entirely evident in the Tarleton State debacle: a play assailing the religious convictions of a dominant majority of the American populace (i.e. Christians) is being defended on the grounds of religious "tolerance." The director, Mr Otte, wants nothing more than to promote "tolerance" amongst traditional, orthodox Christians, who time and again deny that homosexual activity has no place in their religious tradition.

Unfortunately, Mr Otte and Tarleton State can't have it that way, because that's simply not what tolerance is. And the popular outcry against their efforts is proof that, thankfully, at least some Americans still understand the value of reason in the act of accepting a good.