A person who pleads for a cause or propounds an idea

Usage examples of proponent.

Linked to this bellicose nationalism was a return to pre-Civil War patterns in which Southerners were the most ardent proponents of American imperial expansion.

The haranguers were back after the rain: preachers for bizarre religions, recruiters for little outwoods colonies, proponents of strange social ideals.

Deemer would have said if he had been there - the other side pushing its advantage to the extreme and making the supposititious testimony distinctly damaging to the interests of its proponents.

The theory of intelligent design itself is not overtly theist - indeed its proponents try very hard not to draw religious conclusions.

As theistic fundamentalists view the history of their tradition as being guided by the hand of God, so do the proponents of scientism see the history of science as being led by the hand of Nature.

Proponents of the new philosophy were presented with a dilemma: to support the experimental methodology of science, many early natural philosophers affirmed the voluntarist view of natural laws being imposed on nature from without.

Though it was clearly a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing freedom of speech, its Federalist proponents in Congress insisted, like Adams, that it was a war measure, and an improvement on the existing common law in that proof of the truth of the libel could be used as a legitimate defense.

Its proponents claim that it is also antiracist, because it suggests that all people can make rapid progress toward democracy regardless of their race, culture, or economic level.

Proponents on both sides of the Brownback bill ran television ads in Utah, North Dakota, Georgia, and Washington, D.

But he came originally, his proponent said, from Vilna, the holy city of Jewish Europe, a place known, in spite of its reputation for hardheadedness, to harbor men who took a cordial and sympathetic view of golems.

Curiously, however, the work of Kokan and other pioneer Western-style painters seems to have fallen into obscurity, and some artists in the last years of the Tokugawa shogunate, after Japan had been opened by Perry, laboriously set about to learn Western painting on their own from the few foreign-language manuals they could acquire without being aware of what Kokan and his fellow proponents of Dutch Studies had already accomplished.

While SRT was willing to give up the Lorentzian assumptions of space and time being immutably what they had always been, the proponents of an LET interpretation point out that SRT itself carries an assumption that would seem far closer to home and more readily open to question, namely that the measuring standards themselves are immutable.

Consequently, there may not be as many valuable patents among the 40 percent of non performing patents as IP management proponents think.

Built as part of a gigantic project to harness the mighty tides that pour in from the great Bay of Fundy, the village was now basking in temporary abeyance, almost deserted, yet not a ghost town, for proponents of the Quoddy Project were still working to revive the plan.

Even if proponents of a religion are reasonably sure that their beliefs are true, and even if they think there are valid and conclusive arguments for their validity, their religious assertions still cannot be taken as informative utterances.