"The charge of intolerance has come to wield enormous power in much of Western culture. . . . It functions as a ‘defeater belief.’ A defeater belief is a belief that defeats other beliefs—i.e., if you hold a defeater belief to be true "(whether it is true or not is irrelevant), you cannot possibly hold certain other beliefs to be true: the defeater belief rules certain other beliefs out of court and thus defeats them. . . . Put together several such defeater beliefs and make them widely popular, and you have created an implausibility structure: opposing beliefs are thought so implausible as to be scarcely worth listening to, let alone compelling or convincing." For this reason, "the new tolerance tends to avoid serious engagement over difficult moral issues, analyzing almost every issue on the one axis tolerant/intolerant, excluding all others from the pantheon of the virtuous who do not align with this axis."
D. A. Carson, The Intolerance of Tolerance