Tolerance vs Acceptance

"Tolerant, but not stupid. Just because you have to tolerate something doesn't mean you have to approve of it. If you had to approve of it it'd be called [acceptance]. Tolerate means you're just putting up with it." ~South Park

Got into a discussion this morning about tolerance vs. acceptance. His argument: "The premise is quite simple - if you refuse to accept something you never reach the point where you tolerate it...
When you accept, when you live with it, that's the first step to deciding tolerance or intolerance. When YOU get to the "OK" part, that's the tolerance."

Some obvious problems of definition here. What does it mean to really "accept" something? or to "tolerate" it? Acceptance could be defined as an being met with approval, a favorable reception. You accept your parents (I hope) and family, you accept your roommate (though his habit of partying might annoy you), etc. You could also define acceptance as realizing/coming to terms with something as a fact. I accept that the Nazis controlled Germany even if in general I do not approve of Nazis or Hitler.

Tolerance on the other hand is much more tricky. It's not an approval of something, in fact, tolerance might even only exist in the absence of approval. Tolerance of an act is more or less an acknowledgment of the freedom of that act without agreeing with it. To quote Chesterton, "To have a right to do a thing is not the same as to be right in doing it." That's almost the point of tolerance. Premarital sex may be wrong, and while there is not a "right" to sex, though you could make the case that in a free society people should be able to do as they wish without hurting others.

To take the original case of gay marriage, one might say "You must accept that gay relationships happen before you can even start to have a reaction (let alone tolerance) to it" if he went with the second definition of acceptance, or one might say (with the first), "I know that gay relationships occur and while I will tolerate them for the sake of freedom I do not accept (read: approve) of such behavior". Which one you pick really depends on which definition you use, I don't think either is more or less logically valid than the other.

Which sort of brings me to political correctness. A recent blogger defined political correctness (or in his words, politically savvy) as making everyone feel welcome. One might generalize it as a way of speaking intended to avoid offense.

Don't get me wrong, offending people is not usually a good thing. It may be the wholesome thing on certain desperate circumstances, but not usually. Therefore speaking to avoid offense is also probably a good thing. But with some caveats. One problem is that people nowadays are offended absurdly easily. Since people are offended when they ought not to be, the existence of offense is not a good gauge for whether what was said was offensive. If someone is offended when I casually voice my opinion that Chemistry is a better subject than Sociology, it is not reasonable to conclude that thinking Chemistry to be better than Sociology is an offensive idea.

Another problem comes up with freedom of speech. It may be a good idea to try to make everyone feel welcome, but the fact is this doesn't always happen. People are just sometimes jerks. However, trying to silence them in the name of tolerance/political correctness/good taste/whatever is just flat out wrong. The point of free speech is that while I disagree with what you are saying, I will defend your right to say it.

I should probably go study Chemistry, so I'll wrap this up with a quote from Chesterton:
"Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed."