Battles over religious liberty being waged as part of America’s culture wars likely won’t be resolved unless both sides accept “live and let live” solutions that require each to compromise on broad, strongly held views, one of the nation’s leading authorities on the topic said Thursday.

Delivering the 24th Annual Davis, Markert, Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Freedom, Douglas Laycock said that as long as religious conservatives try to regulate other people’s lives in matters of sexual morality, their opponents will view religious liberty with hostility.

On the other side, those who demand the right to live by their own values damage their cause when they try to force opposing religious groups to assist them in doing so.

“Each side respects the liberties of the other only when it lacks the votes to impose its own views. Each side wants a total win and this mutual insistence on total wins is very bad for liberty,” Laycock said.

“Religious liberty is at risk, and its loss would be a loss for America, whatever side of the culture wars you think you’re on.”

Laycock is the Robert E. Scott Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law and a professor of religious studies. Before joining the Virginia faculty in 2010, Laycock was the Yale Kamisar Collegiate Professor of Law at U-M, and also taught at the University of Texas and the University of Chicago.

He said that issues of sexual morality are driving the biggest disputes involving religious liberty today. Arguments over abortion, same-sex marriage, contraception, sterilization and emergency contraception all have the same fundamental structure.

“What one side views as a great evil, the other side views as a fundamental human right,” Laycock said.

In the lecture, he explored cases involving the controversial topics and discussed the intricate web of issues that have come into play.

“On same-sex marriage, the disagreement begins with a disagreement over the nature of marriage,” he said. “Marriage is a legal relationship, and for many people also a religious relationship. The secular side sees the legal relationship as primary. The committed religious believers see the religious relationship as primary.”

Contraception, an issue that for decades appeared to have been settled, has been disrupted by the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that employers provide birth control, some forms of which conflict with the beliefs of religious employers.

And the abortion debate, with its fundamental dispute over what constitutes life, is a special case, Laycock said.

“The pro-life side sees it as killing innocent human beings and you cannot expect them to be ‘live and let live’ about that,” he said. “The moral imperatives on the pro-choice side are equally strong, but access to abortions for women who need them does not include compelling pro-life doctors and nurses to provide them.”

These disputes reach into the academic realm as well, he said. He cited cases like the Eastern Michigan University counseling student who was expelled for refusing to counsel gay clients, or religious student groups forced to move off campus because they sought to require a statement of faith for leadership positions.

The annual lecture is named for three former U-M faculty members — Chandler Davis, Clement Markert and Mark Nickerson — who in 1954 refused to answer questions about their political associations when called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. All three were suspended from the university. Markert subsequently was reinstated, and Davis and Nickerson were dismissed.

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• academic freedom