Originally a comment by kevinkirkpatrick on I did say.
It’s said no analogy is perfect; so take this with a grain of salt:
Say I took issue with the legal institution of marriage; and felt it was worth exploring whether our society would be better off massively redefining marriage or, perhaps, doing away with it altogether (I think such a case exists – marriage doesn’t seem to provide benefits, like financial assistance w/ guardianship. to many who need them; while it certainly has some massive rob-the-poor-to-feed-the-rich effects that do our society no good) . Such explorations might entail examinations of romantic couplings vs. friendships; childless couples vs uncoupled guardians; various toxic religious views of marriage; etc., etc.
But if such explorations were interrupted with “Do you support same-sex marriage, Yes or No?”, and that question came across in a way that was either outright disrespectful, or if I felt a “yes” or “no” might be used in a way to undercut my more nuanced considerations of marriage altogether… then yeah, I might be inclined to tell questioner where they could shove their question. However, I could easily see my refusal to answer the question be stripped of the context for which I’d refused to answer, and be used as an indictment of my having a homophobic stance toward gay marriage. And, by the way, there’s a horde of people whose lifelong aspirations seem to focus on destroying my reputation, who have no more interest in the situation than to throw fuel on any such fires in anyway they can. Yeah, I could definitely see the whole issue winding up in a pretty nasty place.
Anyway, not sure if that analogy fully captures the situation at hand, but for whatever reason, it’s definitely helping snap things into focus for me.