Question

Do you think that the United States is tolerant of “difference?” Our country was founded on the concept of religious tolerance, but...Wikipedia defines religious intolerance as:

Religious intolerance, rather, is when a group (e.g., a society, religious group, non-religious group) specifically refuses to tolerate practices, persons or beliefs on religious grounds (i.e., intolerance in practice).

What do you think? Are there some cultures more tolerant/less tolerant?

Are the U.S. experiences any different than that of other cultures? Frame your discussion within the context of the sociological perspectives.

Answer 1

Answer.

While the constitutional fabric of the United States would lead one to judge the US as generically tolerant of different races, gender identities, sexual preferences, languages an ethnicities, the fact is that the social beliefs practices of the mainstream United States tend to be more different from the Constitutional ethos.

To begin with, the recent rise in Racial profiling, wage gaps, hate crimes, transgender homelessness, and unequal marriage laws and other problems point towards a general rise in intolerance on a considerablly wide scale. If we analyse the range of tolerance from a sociological perspective, then we can see that there is a scope of behaviors that are considered acceptable according to the majority. Tolerance then would be indicated by behaviours which are deviant or different from the norm or average behaviour in society, such as showing a tattooed arm in a professional or formal setting like government office, a church congregation, etc. Most people in a society try to practice conformity-oriented behaviors in order to gain social accepted and avoid negative judgements by others. Thus, in light of this definition, we see that the while several differences prevail within the US society, they are largely controlled or minimised by inducing a strong sense of social judgement on the groups which are different from the mainstream American society and as a consequence of this social confinement of the differential elements, the American society appears increasingly less tolerant.