In an article I read in the National Review Online, the author, Jay Nordlinger, quoted a Match.com engineer who said that conservatives were far more likely to be open and tolerant than liberals when it came to the search for love.
Now, in the face of this it seems ludicrous. After all, conservatives kill liberals over political or religious differences far more often than the other way around. These are not the actions of a tolerant-minded people.
But let's examine the special circumstances here. A person who is open minded (which describes a liberal more than a conservative) is far more likely to look for someone who is open-minded as a life partner, or even someone to hang out with. Liberals do not like conflict and arguments. Someone who is open minded is far more likely to be able to see both sides of an issue and discuss them rationally than someone who sees the world though a closed, unyielding mind.
Closed-minded people, on the other hand, don't want to deal with other close-minded people unless they're EXACTLY like they are. Those are extremely hard to find. Instead, they usually end up looking for open-minded people who can put up with them, because odds are much higher that there are more open-minded people who can put up with them than there are closed-minded people exactly like them.
So the assertion is likely true, within its own context: WHEN LOOKING FOR LOVE, conservatives are probably more tolerant of who they date than liberals.
But that doesn't make them more tolerant as a people.
If you click on the link, read the comments posted by die-hard conservatives. They are not the words of a tolerant people.
I don't know if the thrust of the article was to paint conservatives in a different (and by extension, not necessarily true) light, whether it was tongue in cheek or just reporting an odd fact. Whatever the case, the conservatives had a field-day ragging on the liberals and, by doing so, proved the author's implication - that conservatives are more tolerant than liberals overall - was utterly untrue.
Never before have I seen an author so completely undone by the "applause" of the crowd.
I can only hope that he was being ironic.
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