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December 11, 2014|2:27 pm

Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, delivering the Institute on Religion and Democracy's 2014 Diane Knippers Memorial Lecture, Washington, D.C., October 16, 2014.

WASHINGTON Will those liberals who value diversity and tolerance of differing viewpoints lose their fight with the liberals who have worked to drive those who do not share their opinions from the public square? Professor Robert P. George believes they will. Tolerant liberals, however, have two advantages in that fight.

On Oct. 16, George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, delivered the Institute on Religion and Democracy's 2014 Diane Knippers Memorial Lecture in Washington, D.C. In that speech (coverage and links to the video here), he argued that supporters of gay marriage will not allow for the religious freedom of those opposed to gay marriage because their ideology does not allow for the fact that gay marriage dissenters can be reasonable people of goodwill. There are some tolerant liberals that continue to support religious freedom, he said, but those liberals "will lose the battle."

During the Q&A after the speech, I suggested to George two reasons he could be wrong, that tolerant liberals could win that fight with intolerant liberals.

First, in American democracy extremism loses and moderation wins. In fact, our Founders designed our government to function that way. If most elections in the United States had a proportional representation system, candidates who can gain the support of a small portion of the population can still gain some measure of political power. Instead, the United States has a winner-take-all electoral system in which a plurality of the vote is required to win elections. This encourages candidates to build broad coalitions in order to win. In this way, our election system has a moderating effect on our candidates and our political discourse.

Intolerant liberalism has only recently become a mainstream phenomenon. It has been below the surface (or confined mostly to college campuses) for a while, but since President Barack Obama was reelected in 2012, intolerant liberals have been much more strident and much more public.

This extremism will lead to a backlash. We may have already seen the beginnings of the backlash in the responses to the Houston Mayor sermon subpoena scandal, the Hitching Post Wedding Chapel storyand the Republican victories in the midterm elections.

While support for gay marriage has seen strong growth in recent years, support for religious freedom also remains strong. Political candidates, even those who support gay marriage, will not want to be associated with a movement seen as attacking religious freedom.

Second, tolerant liberals are holding views consistent with their ideology. The hypocrisy of intolerant liberals is unsustainable in the long-term as the absurdity of their position continues to reveal itself.

Read more here:
Analysis: Why Tolerant Liberals Can Win Their Fight With Intolerant Liberals; A Response to Robert P. George