Archibishop Chaput of Philadelphia knows a thing or two about tolerance. I preached a Sunday School lesson about tolerance today. I’ll get into it later. Let me quote the Archbishop though.

We need to remember that tolerance is not a Christian virtue. Charity, justice, mercy, prudence, honesty — these are Christian virtues. And obviously, in a diverse community, tolerance is an important working principle. But it’s never an end itself. In fact, tolerating grave evil within a society is itself a form of serious evil. Likewise, democratic pluralism does not mean that Catholics should be quiet in public about serious moral issues because of some misguided sense of good manners. A healthy democracy requires vigorous moral debate to survive.

This year during Lent, he also said that evil preaches tolerance until it is dominant, then it tries to silence good.

We see that more and more in society and as culture is upstream from politics, we are seeing an increasing intolerance for moral virtue creeping downstream into our politics.

During the August recesses of 2009, the media — a creature of an ever more secular culture — reported again and again about hostile tea party crowds and their heckling of members of congress. In fact, of eight documented acts of violence during that August recess, seven were against tea party activists.

The intolerance of the left continues to grow. SWAT teams show up at conservatives doors in the night as a form of intimidation. Union thugs show up at private individuals’ homes to bang on their windows because of policy disagreements.

The President says to bring guns to knife fights, the SPLC labels conservative groups with which it disagrees “hate organizations,” and when nuts do show up with guns the secularists blame conservatives or choose to ignore the act and make excuses for not covering it. “Well,” they say, ” no one died so it isn’t news.”

Increasingly, the left is having a hard time playing the “but the other side does it too” card because the examples and consistency of intolerance for conservative views is growing more and more extreme.

On Twitter, Chris Ziegler flags another example of left-wing intolerance. The Republican Party of Sarasota County in Florida put up a “Repeal Obama” billboard on Friday. Today it stands destroyed.

Evil preaches tolerance until it is dominant. Then it tries to silence good. There is nothing new under the sun and what we are seeing here is nothing new, just a change. Tolerance has been redefined to mean accept and it is no longer enough to have values. The values must be the correct values.

The situation will only grow worse and the leader in this nation seems to talk a good game when it is politically advantageous, but otherwise tells his supporters the bring guns to knife fights while his Vice President tells a majority black audience that Republicans want to put them back in chains.

We are rapidly moving to a time when the First Amendment will no longer be as good as the paper on which it is written. It will be only as good as the judges put on the bench.