Tolerance, Intolerance, and Hypocrisy

In the wake of the Phil Robertson news, I'm hearing a lot of the conservative point that liberals preach tolerance and diversity, but they don't tolerate diversity that disagrees with them, particularly forms of Christianity with traditional views on homosexuality. It is argued that this makes these liberals the intolerant ones, and that their combination of these positions makes them hypocrites and implies an inconsistency that delegitimizes their view.

Of course, I disagree. There is some logical difficulty in extending tolerance to beliefs and practices that are themselves intolerant: too much to immediately jump to the conclusion that those liberals who don't apply their commitment to tolerance that far do so out of animus or consequently that they are hypocritical and their position untenably inconsistent. Liberals can quite comfortably oppose anti-gay views without having to jettison their general support for tolerance.  

Now, it pretty much goes without saying that the vast majority of liberals don't want to use the government to take people like Phil Robertson off the air. They just don't want to help put him on the air by patronizing and adding to the profits of companies that advertise on and support his show. They still tolerate him in the sense relevant to politics, in that they don't want to make it a legal issue.

That said, in a different sense of 'tolerate' (as in, I guess, 'accept continued exposure to without public sign of dissent or attempt to rebuff'), I suppose it's true that most liberals don't want to tolerate sects of Christianity that are intolerant of gay and lesbian people, just like liberals don't want to tolerate racism, because liberals don't want to tolerate intolerance; it would kind of be self-defeating. There's a logical wrinkle (at the very least!) in arguing that a consistent application of tolerance requires that it tolerate intolerance, so it makes little sense to fault liberals for failing to do so, especially without even having addressed this problem.

This disagreement over whether or not liberal hypocrisy has been committed seems like another case of the concept of "self-reference" surfacing in our political issues, generating confusion and leading to error. Liberalism preaches tolerance and it obliges that we tolerate the wide array of differences and diversity that we encounter, but how would it be if the liberal imperative to tolerate referred to itself? How would it work to reflect tolerance back on itself  (or, actually, on its negation, intolerance), and apply it to itself? How would it work if the values of liberalism obliged us to tolerate every difference we encountered, even intolerant ones?

I really think this is analogous to arguing that government infringes on your freedom by prosecuting your attempts to kidnap and enslave others. This freedom being argued for is the freedom to make others unfree; just like the tolerance being demanded in Phil Robertson's case is the tolerance to not tolerate others.

Update: I have never been entirely satisfied that this post says exactly what I meant, but I just came across another post that I think helps illustrate what I was getting at. To extend tolerance to the intolerant only makes tolerance less valuable. To do it out of logical necessity to avoid internal contradiction, sure. But to do it to avoid charges of inconsistency and hypocrisy that are as weak as I've detailed here?!