Liberal Tolerance

Excellent post election thoughts that I found on AtlanticBlog (post: After the election which references yet another insightful blogger Mark Kleiman). AtlanticBlog is by an American economist living and working in Ireland named William Sjostrom...worth checking out. A snippet of Mark's words that William, and now I, posted...but read Mark's entire post.

Liberals are more willing than conservatives to make the majority suffer to protect the minorities. And the fact that the liberal leadership is profoundly secular in its orientation makes it easy to interpret this as hostility to religion, or to religiosity, generally. We claim that we are merely carrying out the Enlightenment program of getting the heavy hand of the state off religion, but that's not really a very convincing claim given our own actual beliefs and practices, and given the sheer hatred and contempt the usual liberal commentator can pack into the word "fundamentalist." Where, one might reasonably ask, is liberal tolerance when the chips are down?