Those "illiberal liberals'!

This piece, from OpinionJournal.com, illustrates one of the glaring lies and myths perpetuated by the left: they are the ideology of "tolerance"!

In a Jerusalem Post op-ed piece, Emanuele Ottolenghi, a professor at Oxford, describes his search for a roommate in Washington, where he is serving a stint as a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He started by answering roommate ads on the Internet. He would begin a correspondence with the advertiser, but "at the mention of the AEI, somehow, communications would abruptly end."

Then he tried taking out his own ad. A 29-year-old graduate student replied, sending photos of her apartment. Ottolenghi noticed Kedwards stickers in the photo:

Having casually surmised a causal correlation between my outing as an AEI affiliate and the lack of further response, I acted preemptively. "Would you cope with a neo-conservative pro-Bush European working at the AEI, though?" I asked gingerly, suggesting we could agree not to talk politics.

[The prospective roomie replied:] "I just returned from working on the Kerry campaign, and I'm a lesbian. Unfortunately, I don't think I could live with anyone who supports an administration so intolerant of gay people. I know that's probably ridiculous, but I just can't do it."

Not expecting such closed-mindedness from a liberal, I retorted that my views on homosexuality were perfectly tuned to liberal standards. But that only earned me a patronizing lesson.

"Nah, I didn't assume you were intolerant on the subject of gay people. Europe is a more enlightened place than here, that's for sure. You must understand, though, that we just lost a very tough and very emotional election. It's my opinion that the Bush administration won this election by conniving rural Americans [sic] (those least likely to be affected by terrorism, and those least likely to encounter a gay person) that they should be afraid of terrorism and gay marriage."

The would-be roommate told Ottolenghi that she had never met an antigay Republican, and even said she socialized with some GOP members. (Why, some of my best friends . . .) But, she said, "Regardless of what we might have in common, or the type of people I'm willing to socialize with, I couldn't have a Bush supporter living in my home!"

Now of course a man's home is his castle, and this young lady was perfectly within her rights to reject Ottolenghi on political grounds. But this anecdote illustrates a truth of which just about any right-leaning resident of a big city is well aware: that these days "liberals" are a lot less tolerant than they like to think.