A Harvard law professor has called for liberals to begin treating like Nazis those who subscribe to Christian or conservative beliefs.

In a Friday blog post at Balkinization, Mark Tushnet said conservatives and Christians have lost the culture wars, and now the question is “how to deal with the losers.”

“My own judgment is that taking a hard line (‘You lost, live with it’) is better than trying to accommodate the losers,” he wrote.

“Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown,” Mr. Tushnet wrote, citing the Supreme Court case on segregation. “And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.”

Mr. Tushnet said liberals should stop being so hesitant to advance their agenda through the judiciary, saying a majority of federal judges have been appointed by Democratic presidents, and they need not worry “reversal by the Supreme Court” now that former Associate Justice Antonin Scalia is dead.

But Heritage Foundation senior research fellow Ryan T. Anderson argued that liberals have already used the judiciary unrelentingly to advance their prerogatives when the democratic process fails.

“Liberals aggressively sought in the courts an unlimited abortion license, a redefinition of marriage, and now for transgender bathroom policies throughout the nation,” Mr. Anderson wrote in an op-ed for the Daily Signal. “Liberals haven’t been bashful to use the courts to reshape social policy when they couldn’t win at the polls.”

Mr. Anderson also said Mr. Tushnet’s analogy to post-World War II Germany is inapt.

“Ah, yes, if the ‘losers’ of the American ‘culture wars’ are the functional equivalent of racists and Nazis, then Tushnet’s argument works wonderfully,” he said. “But if Orthodox Jews, Roman Catholics, Evangelical Christians, Latter-Day Saints, faithful Muslims, and other Americans who believe that marriage is the union of a man and woman are decent members of society, maybe Tushnet should reconsider his hostility.”

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