In the mid-twentieth century, sex-and-gender conservatives in TEC/CoE began to lose their majority, and sex-and-gender liberals were increasingly in a position to give their conscientious beliefs institutional expression instead. This forced conservatives to ‘come out of the closet’ to themselves and others about their commitment to (what I shall call) the ‘Institutional Purity Principle’ [IPP]:
It is contrary to our conscientious beliefs to live within an institution whose institutional policies are incompatible with our conscientious beliefs.
It did not take them very long to turn this exposure into a challenge to liberals with the following arguments:
Arg. 1: Given [IPP], tolerance for our conscientious beliefs requires you to let us set institutional policy whether or not we hold a majority; and/or requires you to complicate the polity of the institution in such a way as to insulate us from close encounters with parts of the institution in which your conscientious beliefs prevail.Arg. 2: Given [IPP], your commitment to being inclusive requires you to allow our conscientious beliefs to set institutional polity and/or to complicate it whether or not we hold a majority.
In other words, the conservatives have played on liberal propensities for tolerance and inclusiveness to insist that liberals tolerate not only individual beliefs but institutional policies contrary to liberal conscientious beliefs, and to do so no matter who holds the majority.
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