Everyone has multiple dimensions to their lives and develops specific and sometimes specialized social instruments to function. We all have sets of behaviours and social guidelines that we follow in varying social groups.
If we are to, for example, accept and support a person in a specific sector of our lives but in other sectors disagree with that same person’s nature of being, it should create inner conflict. Somehow, this seems to happen in many people; possibly, they are unaware of this dualistic state. This is tolerance, not acceptance.
Part of the nature of acceptance is to have the abilities necessary to defend someone in their absence, whether or not they are part of that particular social institution. Tolerance is essentially the capacity to endure. This is where tolerance and acceptance diverge.
A large psychological aspect of acceptance is sympathetic reproduction of identity, differentiated from one’s own identity inventory. Meaning that although you may not claim or perform a certain identity you do have an empathetic construction in your own mind of that identity.
I have had to come to terms with these ideas over the course of my life. I have had to investigate why people vary their degree of support and understanding.
I have also had to learn from experience that there are those, who in certain groups or in private, reveal their understanding and support but withdraw it when outside of the circumstance they were originally extended.
This is why I encourage acceptance, not just tolerance.