In Eugene, Oregon, by a law passed in 1913, socks must be supported by garters on Sunday mornings between 8 a.m. and noon, and police are empowered to lift trousers legs for inspection.

In Hamilton, Ontario, burglars must register with the police, no less than seven days in advance of the crime, a statement of the address of the property to be entered and an itemized list of goods to be stolen, on penalty of forfeiting burglarizing privileges for six months for the first offense and one year for each offense thereafter.

In Cairo (Egypt), failure to bribe a judge is an offense punishable by a fine to be determined at the judge’s discretion.

In the city of Toulouse (France), thinking about a hippopotamus is a crime, and notices are posted at every major intersection detailing the potential penalties for various degrees of violation.

In Vermont, it is possible to libel maple syrup.

In São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos, Brazil, it is not permitted to carry a concealed Yorkshire terrier without a permit.

In North Korea, every citizen is required to send Respected Comrade Kim Jong-un a card with a personal inscription on his birthday, which happens every day of the year except October 31, when the Respected Comrade goes trick-or-treating.

An occasional correspondent by the name of “Occasional Correspondent” asks a very good question about toleration. You may recall that we had a whole essay on toleration a few days ago, and Occasional Correspondent wonders,

Faced with a group that declares itself your enemy, and whose tenets call for your destruction, at what point are you justified in acting BEFORE they kick in your door at two in the morning and you vanish into night and fog? That is, what evidence is required before one decides to act; and what actions are justified; and how does one calibrate a plan of action to a level of evidence? (I will grant that this is “Do unto others before they do unto you” morality.) This gets beyond the mere bandying of tenets. Is flight — exile or evasion — the only acceptable action? I was thinking of Hitler inviting labor leaders to a May Day rally, which they attended with enthusiasm; days later, arresting them, the first action by the Gestapo under the Gestapo nameplate. In human history, I’m sure such examples could be multiplied a thousandfold.

Take arms against a sea of troubles,
and by opposing end them

but we know how that strategy worked out in the Danish troubles.

Now, this comment brings up several interesting questions. To it we should add an earlier comment from Arkadiy, another correspondent who has often given us things to think about:

Now let’s say that the main tenet of the Calvinism is that there must be no tolerance of satanists. Should we satanists still show tolerance?

Dr. Boli made a short reply to that comment three days ago, but consider this essay a longer reply to both comments.

First, we need not look very far for examples of the sort of thing both Arkadiy and Occasional Correspondent are talking about. It is pretty obvious that they had in mind groups like the Society of St. Pius X, which repudiates the idea of religious freedom, or the so-called Christian nationalists who believe that the United States should be legally designated a Christian nation, or perhaps even the Fox News commentators who rummage through the back corners of their brains for sophistical reasons why Islam should not be tolerated in this country. It is true that these people pose some social difficulties when they drink a little too much at your party and start telling your Indonesian friend what they think. This is where some hosting skills are necessary, but that would be a separate essay.

We should not, however, pretend that this is a new thing. Because the more mainstream Christian denominations have lately accepted religious freedom as a fine and dandy thing, we are inclined to think of that as a characteristically Christian attitude. It is probably the attitude of Christ and his Apostles, but it is not characteristically Christian. Not far from Pittsburgh are Harmony and Economy, two towns settled more than two centuries ago by the Harmonists. They were a religious society that came to this country because they were fleeing Lutheran persecution. You do not hear the words “Lutheran persecution” very often these days, but two centuries ago it was a thing to reckon with. The sects that you think of as respectable bastions of good citizenship today were, when they had the power of the state behind them, almost universally persecutors.

When the Bill of Rights was pasted on the end of the Constitution, this country was filled with dogmatically intolerant religions. Congregationalists whipped Baptists and hanged Quakers, and of course they did much worse things to good Satanists like us. Anglicans made Catholicism illegal, ending the Catholic experiment with religious toleration in Maryland as soon as the Anglicans became the majority. And the Catholics had proclaimed religious toleration only because they were English Catholics escaping from intolerance; the Catholic attitude to religious freedom was rather different in Spain or France or the Papal States. Among significant religious groups in our early history, only the Quakers dogmatically insisted on religious freedom rather than the reverse. Toleration is generally the plea of minority religions; intolerance is the weapon of a majority that fears the loss of its dominance.

The young United States had a unique opportunity. In any given state, one religious group might be dominant, but the radically different cultures in the different states made every religion a minority religion in the federation as a whole. Thus the First Amendment—which did not apply to the states at that point in our history—could be made to seem reasonable to everybody, because no one could count on being in a position to impose any single religion on the country.

So we have already come up with the answer to how far we should legally tolerate intolerant religions, and the answer is the First Amendment. You Puritans may continue to practice your religion. You may continue to believe that Quakers ought not to be allowed to live. You may print your incendiary pamphlets proving from Scripture that God demands the slaughter of the heathen (Deut. 7:2); you may preach your fire-and-brimstone sermons about what will happen to those people when an angry God gets his claws into them. What you may not do is interfere with our right to live peaceful lives. As long as your tenets remain tenets, we leave you alone. When they become actions, we enforce the laws against destruction of property or murder.

It is too bad, isn’t it? If I am absolutely certain that someone wants to steal my wallet, I still cannot have her arrested until she actually steals it. I cannot have her arrested if I know in the depths of my heart that she is the sort of person who is prone to double-parking, even though she has told me she would double-park if she could get away with it. Now, if she follows me with a megaphone and constantly shouts insults at me, there are laws to stop her, at least unless she is a member of Congress. If she fills my mailbox with death threats, there are laws to stop her. Quite a lot of legal theory has gone into calibrating a plan of action to a level of evidence: this is why there are laws against certain kinds of conspiracy, for example. Violating those laws is an illegal act of a certain kind, and it can be proved by evidence. But if she just sits there coveting my money or simmering with contempt for parking laws, I can do nothing until her mental disposition turns into action.

A threat has to be very specific in order to be actionable. “All Quakers should be hanged” is grossly impolite and unneighborly, but it is not a crime. Think how our prisons would swell if it were a crime to quote Shakespeare: “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.”

We cannot punish people for crimes we are sure they were going to commit. That is a fundamental rule of justice. When we forget it, we get the Gestapo. That is precisely what the Gestapo was for: to round up the people who were going to commit crimes—because they were Socialists, because they were gypsies, because they were Jews, because they were Christian Democrats, because they were intellectuals, and you know what those people are like—before they actually committed them.

That is the legal aspect of the question. The social aspect is both easier and harder. It is easier because the principle is obvious; it is harder because the principle is not natural. We must treat people politely and even pleasantly even if we know that, in the abstract, they think we should be deported or killed. If a Christian nationalist walks into an Afghan restaurant, it will not do for the owner to shout at him and spit in his face. Even if he has just seen that Christian nationalist on television spouting the most egregious codswallop about Muslims, the owner of that restaurant is going to have to exercise some toleration. This is obvious, because the alternative is extreme unpleasantness, not just for both the owner and that one customer, but also for every other patron in the restaurant. It is not natural, however. The natural reaction would be to shout at him and spit in his face.

What Dr. Boli finds, to his sorrow, is that there are too many people these days who are willing to say that the natural reaction is the correct reaction. The intolerant person is wrong, they say. Intolerance cannot be tolerated, they say. That attitude makes civilized life impossible, and yet—here is the strange twist—it must be tolerated. It should be repudiated, but even intolerance must be tolerated. Our country was built on toleration for intolerance, because it was built by people who were themselves intolerant and members of intolerant sects.

We should note, by the way, that although “toleration” has become the usual term in these discussions, George Washington did not like it. “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights,” he wrote to the Touro Synagogue in Newport. What he means is that there must be no correct standard of religion from which deviations are tolerated just so long as we choose to allow them: we must accept the principle that liberty of conscience can never be taken away (and we should note that this was not written to Christians, in case the question of whether our “founders” meant to have liberty only for different Christian sects comes up in debate). We do not have to like those religions; insisting that liberty of conscience is an inherent natural right takes our approval or disapproval out of the question entirely. We can assume that most people have wrong and probably dangerous opinions, but we don’t care. Instead, we judge our citizens by what they do as citizens, and if in practice they leave us alone, then in theory they can wish us all the ill they like.

It is time once again to talk about toleration.

What is wrong with American politics today? In fact, we might reasonably drop the qualifying adjective “American,” since the failing Dr. Boli is about to identify for you has infected the whole world. What is wrong with politics today is that we have forgotten the principle of toleration. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we have repudiated it. We have approval, and we have disapproval in bucketloads, and we can sometimes manage simple indifference. But we cannot tolerate toleration.

Now, toleration was never a natural idea. Toleration is absurd, in fact. It just happens to be a necessary absurdity.

Let us take a concrete example. Suppose a very friendly and polite family moves into the house next door. You find them pleasant neighbors: they are quiet and tidy, and they always have a smile and a wave for you. Then one day you learn to your dismay and horror that they are Presbyterians.

You cannot possibly approve of Presbyterians. Calvinism is anathema to you. As a devoted Satanist, you have dedicated your life to the principle of free will.

We have established that you cannot be indifferent to your neighbors’ Presbyterianism. You can only disapprove in the strongest possible terms. They are wrong, and their wrongness affects the single most important thing in the world, which is our eternal destiny. It is absurd to continue to allow them to live in your neighborhood and expose your children to the filth and corruption of their Calvinist ideas. It is absurd that they should be allowed to live at all.

Yet that is precisely what must happen if we are to have civilized life at all. We must tolerate those Presbyterians. We must allow them to live in our neighborhood unmolested. We must even be friendly and polite to them. And we must do it knowing that they are not only wrong but evil.

We must accept the absurd principle of toleration because we cannot have civilization on a large scale without it. Take away toleration, and democracy is reduced to an angry mob slaughtering the heathen. Take away toleration, and our own security goes with it. Sooner or later, we will be the heathen, and the mob will be coming for us.

Well, you may say, the principle of toleration is built into the Constitution, having thus the force of law. But toleration as a legal principle is worth very little without toleration as a social principle. A man who is hounded and harassed by his neighbors, and whose every waking hour is made misery, will derive little consolation from the knowledge that his punishment was not officially decreed by a judge.

This is where we are failing. On the whole, we accept toleration as a legal principle. Put a repeal of the First Amendment on the ballot, and it will be soundly defeated, in spite of the significant minority of cranks and fools who would vote for it. But we make a quibbling distinction between the legal principle and the social reality. You may hold your own religious opinions, we say, but the First Amendment does not shield you from the most extreme expressions of disapproval from us. And we are perfectly correct in saying that. The First Amendment does not shield anyone from being bullied and insulted. In fact the First Amendment, by necessity, provides a stout shield for the bullies. Only good manners stand between the bully and his victim. Only the general agreement of society at large that certain things are not done can guarantee a civilized standard of behavior. Only a civilized standard of behavior can make it bearable to live in society at large.

None of this prohibits us from telling Presbyterians that they are wrong, and in the most vigorous terms. The Presbyterians enjoy the same privilege. They may spend as much breath as they like warning us that we have chosen the path of damnation, although how a Calvinist could say that is beyond the understanding of good Satanists like us. They may tell us that we represent a grave danger to everything that is good in our nation. They may print pamphlets warning the public that Satanism is second only to Anglicanism on the scale of wicked delusions. But then, when they meet us on the streetcar or in the hardware store, they must be as polite and cordial as if they thought Satanists were the very pattern of virtue. We Satanists must do the same for the Presbyterians.

You need not tell us that this is absurd. Of course it is absurd. It is practically mad, and probably wicked as well. It can be justified only on the grounds that there is only one condition under which the virtuous (meaning ourselves) can live lives of quiet virtue, which is that we accept that our neighbors may live lives of quiet vice. We may object to noisy vice, but quiet vice that causes us no personal inconvenience must be allowed. Not approved of, which is a different thing. If you are Evangelical Presbyterian and I am United Presbyterian, you have no right to expect me to approve of your heresy. But you do have a right to expect that I will treat you with neighborly politeness if you sit down at my restaurant, and that I will do nothing to prevent you from worshiping your twisted idea of the divine in your own heathenish way.

What has happened, in Dr. Boli’s opinion, is that we have begun to apply reason where what is needed is unreasoning faith. We know that certain things are right and other things are wrong: we very reasonably insist that only the right is acceptable. This is the only possible view if we use reason alone. But toleration, which is unreasonable, demands faith. Certum est quia impossibile, we must say. It is mad; it is wrong; it is impossible to justify; but we must tolerate vice, or we shall have no virtue.