Secretary of State John Kerry defended Americans’ religious tolerance during a town hall meeting with students in Berlin, Germany on Tuesday, in which he said that tolerance also means tolerance for the intolerant, the Boston Globe reports.
“In America, you have a right to be stupid if you want to be,” Kerry said, speaking about how the U.S. deals with intolerance. “And you have a right to be disconnected to somebody else if you want to be. And we tolerate it. We somehow make it through that. Now, I think that’s a virtue. I think that’s something worth fighting for.”
“In America we have total – sometimes you have somebody who’s a little, not as tolerant as somebody else, and that happens anywhere,” he said. “But as a country, as a society, we live and breathe the idea of religious freedom and religious tolerance.”