truth?

I read this article today that made me think about the role of the church in society and also thinking about ‘truth’ and values… how can people say that there is no truth and truth is all relative yet enforce tolerance on everyone even if it contradicts belief/moral values?
The journalist was asking these questions:

“Do faith institutions have a legitimate role in public life in a largely secular country? Are faith institutions subject to the laws of the land even when those are contrary to their own beliefs and doctrine? Does the state recognise the "rights of conscience" in the phrase used by the Archbishop of Canterbury in his letter to the prime minister?
There are other issues are at stake in this confrontation. How does a culture of immense diversity find accommodation between very different sets of values - what kind of tolerance do we allow and what values are allowed to trump others' cherished values? And when values are changing so rapidly - from illegality to gay rights in little more than a generation - how do you ensure that a new consensus is given time to develop, or are you entitled to steam ahead, confident of your moral superiority?”

How can we stand up and say that we believe that there is absolute truth? How do you go about doing that in a society that is ready to jump on anyone who claims to have truth…

Schaeffer discusses it like this…

“We must acknowledge and then act upon the fact that if Christ is our Saviour, he is also our Lord in all of life. He is our Lord not just in religious things and not just in cultural things such as the arts and music, but in our intellectual lives, and in business, and in our relation to society, and in our attitude toward the moral breakdown of our culture. Acknowledging Christ’s Lordship and placing ourselves under what is taught in the whole Bible includes thinking and acting as citizens in relation to our government and its laws. Making Christ Lord in our lives means taking a stand in very direct and practical ways against the world spirit of our age as it rolls along claiming to be autonomous, crushing all that we cherish in its path.”

(Francis A. Schaeffer, The Great Evangelical Disaster, Ch. 1)

Piper, when discussing truth states…

"If the supreme, Creator God exists, then there is Truth with a capital T. God is simply there, and he must be taken as he is. We do not make him or shape him or define him. He makes all things. He shapes. And he defines. So we come into a universe that is full of givens. God is simply there. And he has made the world one way and not another way. And he and his ways are the truth. That is what you embrace when you embrace the supremacy of God….”

“The Bible says, that, except for the gracious work of the Holy Spirit, our hearts always tilt one way: we suppress the ultimate objective truth outside ourselves and we choose to create our own. This is ultimately why the supreme God of the Bible is rejected. If he exists, he is absolute Truth and we must yield to him, and define good and bad, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, true and false, wise and foolish, and our very selves according to him and not according to us.
God is the measure of all things, not man.”

(sermon: challenging the church and culture with truth, 1996 Piper)

the quotes from schaeffer and piper are more about truth rather than relating to this particular issue but i think it's related. I’m sure the debate will rage on… just not sure of my role/response to the whole thing… or is the debate more about church vs state rather than tolerance vs truth?