We live at a time when long-established cultural norms are increasingly being questioned. It’s a time when once seemingly intractable social orthodoxies are being regularly challenged and when the so-called marketplace of ideas has never been so vibrant or unregulated.

Even in cautious Bermuda, a community historically averse to change, there’s growing acceptance of the need to accommodate new thinking about some of our traditional institutions and practices.

Accommodation doesn’t, of course, mean approbation in all instances.

But it does mean a culture of tolerance is emerging in Bermuda for a robust exchange of views and ideas, many of which would likely have gone unspoken just a few short years ago.

On questions ranging from the proposed liberalisation of drug laws to reining in the size and sometimes wastefully extravagant spending of Bermuda’s government to same-sex marriage, debate has been wide-ranging and generally constructive.

Radicalised rhetoric has, in the main, been avoided; reasoned argument has, in the main, trumped tired dogma.

When it comes to even the most potentially contentious subjects, positions have tended to be defended passionately but intelligently.

Respect has been shown to those holding opposing points of view and very few free speech free-for-alls have broken out, with brass-knuckled intolerance and blunt-edged bigotry attempting to masquerade as informed opinion.

Of course, there have been a few notable exceptions.

This year, for instance, a visiting American campaigner against same-sex marriage and gay rights demonstrated precisely why the rhetorical answers to fire and the sword can, at least in the short term, carry even the unlikeliest creeds farther than the sincerity and zeal of more temperate missionaries.

Even though one man’s hate speech can always be argued to be another man’s exercise in free speech, Ayo Kimathi’s fear-mongering was deemed sufficiently obnoxious and incendiary to land him on Bermuda’s stop list.

There is, of course, no absolute right to free speech in Bermuda or elsewhere. And the view was taken that Mr Kimathi’s address came close to violating local law prohibiting incitement to violence, hatred and related matters.

Now Hamilton Princess, Bermuda has refused to provide the venue for two talks that had been scheduled to take place there next week by another American opponent of same-sex marriage.

Ryan T. Anderson, a senior research fellow of the Washington-based Heritage Foundation, was due to speak at the hotel next week.

Heritage Foundation is one of the most influential conservative think-tanks in the United States, and Dr Anderson is its most prominent critic of extending full civil and civic rights to America’s gay and transgendered people.

But in a statement issued on Tuesday, Princess general manager Allan Federer said the hotel would not play host to “anti-diversity discussions” and cancelled the bookings.

The local organisers — groups calling themselves Preserve Marriage and Concerned Citizens of Bermuda — immediately fired back, arguing the hotel was “operating under the false idea that banning a presentation results in upholding diversity, when in reality it violates the definition and practice of diversity in every form”.

And they have a legitimate point.

Clearly, there are some in Bermuda who find Dr Anderson’s views repellent. But, unlike Mr Kimathi, he has never encouraged violence against gay people. Nor has he ever agitated for the “ethnic cleansing of whites” or condemned such gay-friendly black Americans as the Rev Al Sharpton, Lil Wayne, Oprah Winfrey and even President Obama as “Uncle Tom race traitors”.

Dr Anderson’s arguments are, in fact, based on serious academic research. While you can easily disagree with the conclusions he draws, it’s more difficult to condemn him out of hand as a fire-and-brimstone apostle of hate.

A recent Washington Post profile described him, accurately enough, as “the conservative movement’s fresh-faced, millennial, Ivy League-educated spokesman against same-sex marriage”.

The newspaper went on to explain his mainstream appeal as owing as much to his calm and methodical demeanour as his telegenic appearance and expertise as a debater.

Critics in the US and Canada have long held that Dr Anderson presents what they call “the acceptable face of homophobia”, claiming he “relies on flawed research and cherry-picked anecdotes to advance his anti-gay agenda”.

Critics in Bermuda would have been perfectly free to make the selfsame arguments at the Princess hotel if Dr Anderson’s forums had gone ahead instead of being perfunctorily cancelled out of what seems to have been an abundance of caution (the Liberty Theatre was apologising to all and sundry for weeks after Mr Kimathi’s ill-advised appearance there).

His detractors will still have the opportunity to challenge Dr Anderson’s research and conclusions when his forums are held at a hastily found replacement venue, the New Testament Church of God’s Heritage Worship Centre.

Bermuda’s newly emerging culture of tolerance means, by definition, we must all learn to tolerate those views that may run entirely counter to our own, not just expect others to be tolerant of our own opinions.

However, this is a lesson that may take some among us a very long time to learn.

For as Mark Twain pointed out more than a century ago, we all have a built-in tendency to be suspicious of ideas and objects of reverence that fall outside the pale of our own list of sacred things.

“And yet, with strange inconsistency,” he went on to observe, “we continue to be shocked when other people despise or defile the things which are holy to us ...”