[ahartman00]

"increased over the last decades is the average westerner's desire to force those beliefs upon their fellow citizens"

What makes you think this? Galileo was hung for what he said.

"Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been. By now these labels have lost their sting. They always do. By now they're mostly used ironically. But in their time, they had real force."

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

[DanAndersen]

>Galileo was hung for what he said.

I get the point of what you are saying (that times in the past have had very extreme responses to people stating things that were accurate but unpopular), but Galileo was not hung or even executed. He was placed under house arrest (the trouble he got into was also more about stepping on the Church's domain of interpreting Scripture rather than astronomical facts, but that's a tangential popular misconception).

[fortythirteen]

I think the operative word there is "westerner". Particularly in America, there has at least been room for open, somewhat peaceful discourse on contentious topics. One need only look at the Buckley/Vidal debates for proof of that.

Those days are gone, and a emboldened radical left, hell bent on stamping out heterodoxy through violence and intimidation, has the silent consent of progressives.