But can you force a mosque to hold a gay Jewish wedding?
Going back to the original article’s discussion of tolerance as a treaty, the Christians all signed because they were sick of a century of European religious wars. The Amish gave up fighting entirely.
But Islamists aren’t part of the treaty, although they continuously rely on it for cover. We must tolerate their eventual enslavement of us in the name of Islam.
Yet the other part of the “tolerance” we established was that we won’t normally stand around shouting at other people about their incorrect religious beliefs (a few campus preachers notwithstanding, as they’re just out there trying to save corrupted college kids who are going to burn for eternity). We don’t get in people’s faces to scream that they’re interpretation of scriptures is badly flawed (with citations to back it up).
And so we never do this to Muslims, either, even though that’s all it would take to back them down. Islam, unlike Christianity, is very brittle. To a fundamentalist, if any part of the Koran is wrong, the whole religion is a lie because the Koran couldn’t have been written by Allah, who would make no errors.
In contrast, Christianity is very flexible. Most Christians don’t even hold with much of the Bible, and we dismiss many parts of it as wrong, allegorical, or just filler for the overall narrative. Few non-fundamentalist Christians believe the Noah’s Flood story. Serious religious scholars abandoned it shortly after the discovery of the New World because it was ridiculous to think New World animals swam the Atlantic twice to get on a boat so they wouldn’t drown.
The Koran retells retold a great many such Bible stories, stories Christian and Jewish scholars are the experts on. Just tell Muslims that the “Nuh” flood story is a myth, a poorly executed attempt to turn a polytheistic Sumerian story about Enki (the water god who liked man) and Enlil (Jupiter, who wanted to kill man because we kept him awake at night) into a monotheistic story. Christianity wouldn’t be affected at all by such revelations, but Islam couldn’t deal with them because it means Muhammed must’ve been making stuff up.
But nobody in Europe or America yet dares to do that, because we’re tolerant, even of glaring mistakes and factual inaccuracies, and even when that tolerance is not reciprocated in the slightest.