I have come to the conclusion that most people in this day and age are willing to be tolerant of anything and anyone as long as it does not involve absolutes or principles. In other words, I believe most people are unwilling to tolerate absolute truths or principles. People are willing to tolerate ideas and positions that they do not agree with as long as the people who hold to those ideas are willing to tolerate their ideas. But that really is not tolerance. It seems to me that to be tolerant you must accept another’s ideas regardless of whether or not they are accepting yours.
The gay community is a perfect example. They want society to tolerate their lifestyle and have convinced most of society to do just that. However, their animosity and intolerance is poured out on the segment of society that does not accept that lifestyle as being appropriate. They will not tolerate organizations or groups whose standards or beliefs do not accept their lifestyle. Not only will they not tolerate them but they will attempt to bring the force of the judicial system upon them to make them act against their beliefs. Tolerance is defined as “the capacity for or the practice of recognizing and respecting the beliefs or practices of others.” Clearly they are not respecting the beliefs and practices of the Boy Scouts. Now it is true that the Boy Scouts and certain fundamental Christian groups do not exhibit tolerance themselves. But you must be tolerant of them. Their beliefs and standards do not allow them to be tolerant. They would have to give up that which is the basis for their existence. Tolerance would be respecting those beliefs and practices.
What does this have to do with chiropractic? Well, it seems to me that Objective Straight Chiropractic is the most tolerant approach. The very fact that we use the term “Objective” to qualify what we do says that we recognize a difference in the practice of others. That is to say, everything we do in the office is specific for fulfilling our objective, to locate vertebral subluxation because it, in and of itself, is a detriment to the fullest expression of life. We are even tolerant of others who call what they do “chiropractic” despite the fact that it is reducing our college enrollments, forcing our schools to abandon chiropractic, confusing the public as to what chiropractic is and generally bringing the profession to the brink of destruction.
With regard to the practice of medicine, we, as objective straight chiropractors, do not pass judgment, condemn it or even address it. We do not attempt to dissuade people from going to a medical doctor for therapeutic care. You cannot get much more tolerant than that. I wish that the tolerance on the other side was half what ours is. We are continually told by other members of our profession that we are lunatics, charlatans or have the intelligence of a rock to believe the idea that correcting subluxations has any other benefit than musculoskeletal relief. We are told we are not merely unscientific boobs, we are that way by choice. In a time when our profession accepts such unproven practices like acupuncture, nutritional therapy, AK and many more, a chiropractor who says that a vertebral subluxation decreases the quality of one’s life is looked upon as if he is uttering insane babblings. There seems to be tolerance for everything except for principles and the people that hold to them. It is a sad indictment upon our society in general and on our profession in particular. v16n4