I don’t get it.

It may help to place the quote in context if you first understand:

Faith is a virtue, but, like all virtues, when exaggerated it transforms itself into a vice, We need to be careful of the ‘faith trap’ so that we are not swallowed up in it.

Even our leaders see many things differently – and that’s a wonderful thing to me.

I actually agree that we can be too tolerant (I’m thinking of the initial, long reaction to Nazi Germany.), but I also believe that Elder Packer draws his tolerance lines more strictly than I do – and than each of the members of the First Presidency does.

Pres. Uchtdorf stressed that the Church doesn’t want its members to be carbon copies and that we need to accept and respect our diversity. We applaud and love him for saying it that clearly – but it’s harder for us to apply it to those with whom we disagree. We have Pres. Uchtdorf and Pres. Packer – and that ought to be the model for the church membership as a whole.

I can’t ask to be accepted for myself, unless I am willing to accept Pres. Packer for himself – and that is a HUGELY important principle to accept and embrace. Let me repeat that:

I don’t agree with everything Pres. Packer says, but I MUST accept him with his sincere beliefs if I ask to be accepted with mine. If you and I can’t do that, we are no different than you believe him to be in that regard.

So I have listened to both this morning — obviously droopy (on another site) has found that the two are consistent. Packer does emphasize that tolerance, taken to extreme, becomes a vice — this is what he refers to as a “tolerance trap”, but because he no longer qualifies the type of tolerance he is discussing is extreme, he implicitly indicts all tolerance.

President Monson’s message in his main talk wasn’t about tolerance, it was about ‘obedience’, anchored by his personal confession of childhood fire-starting. His talk is not dominated by ‘tolerance’. It was so important to pay years of tithing for a german refugee in Hungary in order to feel ‘worthy’… even to emphasize that the savior was never disloyal, ever was he obedient. Jesus, even in gethsemane was obedient to what he knew was right. knowledge of everything we need to know is entirely dependent upon our living the commandments.

But in his final message, he said, as you noted: “May we be tolerant…pause…as well as kind, and loving to those who do not share our beliefs and standards. The savior brought to this earth a message of love and good will to all men and women…may we ever follow his example. I pray that we may be aware of the needs around us.”

The pause was quite pregnant with meaning.

I hope that man never gets the top job.

Whenever I’m asked to sustain the twelve his image appears in my head.

I don’t get it either. Maybe we are just to simple minded. As a kid it alway confused me when my Dad said one thing and my Mom said another. I would usually listen to the one I agreed with and if I got in trouble I would say, “Well, the other parent said this….” It worked for me then and it works now but again I am simple minded.

True, we can’t tolerate everything. Even few militant gays tolerate NAMBLA. This is the downside of so called liberalism – we can’t tolerate violence against women or female circumcision just because another culture practises it.

That does not make us completely intolerant. Tolerance, too, has its limits. However, I don’t jive with Boyd’s subtext, which is probably about sex, gays or his other tropes.