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 The Chronicle welcomes you online! Please feel free to respond to these editorials or letters to the editor by sending your letters to the editor.

We condense letters; most, as published, won't exceed 300 words. A letter must include the writer's name and city, which will be published, and an address and telephone number for verification, which will not be published. Writers may be limited to one letter every 30 days. Open letters, letters to third parties and poetry are not considered. Letters from people living outside the Chronicle's circulation area usually are not considered.

Raps Sisler column on 'tolerance'

Web posted October 30, 1999

Editor, The Chronicle

In printing the Oct. 23 column by David Sisler titled, ``Tolerance should not mean endorsement,'' The Chronicle again gave voice to a man with large opinions and a small mind. Judging from the space he gets, Mr. Sisler seems to be one of the paper's poster boys. Readers are regularly exposed to Mr. Sisler's mawkish anecdotes about his extended family or his far-flung missions to convert the heathen. Often his columns are not-so-thinly-veiled expressions of bigotry. This one featured his well-exercised prejudice against homosexuals.

In his column, Mr. Sisler attempted to draw a distinction between two kinds of ``toleration.'' One, which he rejects, is a toleration which endorses or approves. He is, of course, right about this: toleration of another's ideas or practices does not necessarily mean you agree with or share them. Mr. Sisler goes on to imply he represents another kind of toleration, one which means ``we understand that each of us is different.'' He suggests that he ``tolerates'' gays in this sense, but goes on to make it clear that he views homosexuality as wrong and a sin. ``Toleration'' which condemns is, to me, a very strange sort of tolerance indeed!

Mr. Sisler's view here is either ignorant or hypocritical. Quite obviously there is another kind of toleration, the real kind, which Mr. Sisler never mentions. True tolerance is acceptance of difference without either endorsement or condemnation. It's called live and let live.

I wish I could say I am always tolerant, but I am not. I am especially intolerant of bigots like Mr. Sisler.

Charles P. Heywood, Martinez