You can be repulsed with someone and still tolerate them. If you operate a shop, you continue to sell to them. If you're friends with their employer, don't tell

You can be repulsed with someone and still tolerate them. If you operate a shop, you continue to sell to them. If you're friends with their employer, don't tell your friend to fire them. If you are neighbors, you continue to acknowledge their existence when they greet you. And you let your kids play with their kids, so that your values diffuse outwards. When they try to engage you, you give them your attention. If they're homophobic but at the same time they do a good deed, you continue to praise them. When an opportunity arises for you to explain to them, with compassion and respect, their ignorance, you take it up. If you partake in these activities rather than ostracise them from your society, you are tolerating them, repulsion or no. A person who was brought up a racist, but have the attribute of tolerance, will continue to engage the target of his prejudice, and eventually learn of his own prejudice, and his repulsion would be cleared. Tolerance connects a person to reality - it gives a chance for reality to affect change in the person, and vice versa. This is how tolerance can increase society's tolerance. If you wanted to change the world for the better, I think it works better than ostracising and locking up the intolerant. Tolerance means accepting something is part of your reality, even when you don't like it. If tolerating means accepting something only if you like it, it wouldn't be called tolerance...:)