In your model, the typical educated western adult would not negatively judge someone who is: promiscuous polygamous voluntarily celibate (why is the expert worried about "curing" this non-problem) mentally ill gender non-conforming (eg cross-dressing) a poor speaker of the native language of the community voluntarily unemployed male and primary child care provider I would have great difficulty if I wanted to avoid hearing negative judgments of those or similar traits from college educated adults. I'm not sure we are communicating with the same concepts. I understand intolerance as any act that occurs primarily to make that state of being less frequent / less visible. When I take my son to the park without my wife, and others comment on how unusual I'm being, that's a kind of intolerance of my behavior. Not that intolerance is necessarily bad. I'm quite intolerant of murderers, child-rapists, and thieves. But saying a particular intolerance isn't problematic is different from saying that type of intolerance never occurs.

Most intolerance doesn't announce itself. It usually dresses itself up as something positive. The cynic in me would say the so-called tolerant people within our society aren't actually tolerant, rather they've adopted a potpourri of non-traditional behaviours in order to signal their faux tolerance, and then act with intolerance to so-called traditionalists (who are racist, homophobic, misogynist, authoritarian, etc). It all depends on how you value the liberal project. Personally I think it rests on shaky foundations, so I have some sympathy for this cynical view, although I think there are genuine moral concerns caught up in a very confused (and often destructive) ideology. Probably the strongest example of intolerance dressed up as tolerance, though, is Western political ideology and how we relate to other societies. The democratic countries are extremely intolerant of other political systems; probably more so than many of their most hated rivals. This is expressed in terms of freedom, individual rights, etc, but elections and other Western political institutions are only tenuously connected to freedom. It's certainly not the case, as is usually assumed by Westerners, that elections are by definition a form of freedom and no further argument is needed. A case needs to be made. Most discussion of Western political ideology tends to assume what it's trying to prove. For example, it's assumed that being incarcerated for a political crime is much worse than being incarcerated for something recognised as a crime in the West, but this is only obviously the case if you already agree with Western political ideology. It's not hard to come up with arguments (the standard line being that it's too easy to abuse) but if a country started giving political prisoners fair trials and following accepted legal practice for incarcerating people based on well-defined political crimes, would we accept that? I doubt it. The fact is that we won't accept anything short of them adoptin