Something a lot of people fail to understand (especially libertarians) is that politics is a social subject. Sure, there is a realm of politics that is up to factual discussion, but at the same time, over that realm is one laced with moral opprobrium and peer pressure. To achieve at politics, one can't derive political statements like math theorems and expect people to be impressed by your reasoning. I mention libertarians because they do just this: they will, with immaculate and unarguable logic reason that, say, the Civil Rights Act is drastically unjust and should be repealed, but they seem to naïvely think that logic is enough to actually convince normies. For us lower on the autism spectrum, we can see there's something more to political affairs and it's worth bringing to consciousness.
An analogy. It's now common for Thanksgiving dinners across the country to be ruined by disheveled teenagers dressed in black arguing with their parents about the Thanksgiving prayer. "Religion is a fairytale," "invisible sky man," and "bronze-age myths" are phrases that can be heard. Village atheists seem to be everywhere nowadays, especially high up on the autism spectrum with libertarians.
Now the angsty teens have a point: their parents do believe in religion as merely a kind of social convention. They don't have good, hard evidence that there's actually a god around, and if they did, they couldn't really be sure of the particulars (not enough to rationally build your life around them). But the village atheist wonders to himself: "Why do people get so upset when I attack/rebut/debunk/challenge their religion? People don't get so insulted if you correct their math or logic or even grammar, so why should they get insulted when you correct something that could conceivably 'liberate' them from potentially more drastic error?"
A good question. And there are probably a number of good answers, but one in particular that's interesting: people are insulted when questioning their religion specifically because they know that it is logically unsound, incoherent or maybe even false.
If there were good reasons to believe in God, or to believe a particular sect of Christianity, a Christian wouldn't be remotely insulted by questions, he would deal with them with cold logic and brush them aside effortlessly. But since we don't live in a world where evidence for a religion is obvious, the primary defense mechanism for religious people is getting offended. Getting offended doesn't convince anyone else, but if a religious person is taught to resist rebuttal with being offended, suddenly the 'fitness' of any particular religious meme increases dramatically and the person becomes immunized to reason.
Here's the idea. The more ridiculous a belief is, the more a person has to become offended in order to preserve it and the more they have to pressure and morally blackmail the disbelievers. I would assume that this is pretty close to a strong linear correlation.
Now it should be obvious that this doesn't just apply to religion. So if a libertarian does say that the Civil Rights Act should be repealed, if you're a normal American you'll probably resist him, call him a racist and dismiss him out of hand. Should you? Why? Do you even know what the Civil Rights Act says? Are you just judging it on its name? And why should you get so insulted if he questions a law you don't really know what it is? Your opinion on the Civil Rights Act is precisely the same as a person who calls himself a Christian but has never even read any of the Bible or knows anything other than Jesus died on a cross and Noah (or was it Moses?) had an ark. You just picked it up as an irrational axiom and you'll defend it with offendedness.
Let me also guess something. You probably have already made up a canned response to justify the Civil Rights Act. Maybe you already opened up a browser tab to look it up and make up reasons to support it. Maybe you'll find good ones, but my point isn't the Civil Rights Act, it's your methodology: you already knew the answer, and knew it emotionally and your first reaction is to make excuses. In religion, there's actually a whole genre of this; it's called apologia. Religious writers would write apologia to defend their faith, not against village atheists, but against their own doubts. The apologia is the original guard against thoughtcrime; and if you have beliefs that you implicitly acknowledge to be poorly justified, your brain has an automatic engine for generating apologiae when put under pressure. If it can't do that, you condemn dissent or flagellate yourself in various ways to prove your faith.
So let me tell you my heuristic for understanding new political affairs. For any political issue, the most controversial opinion on it is generally always correct, and the opinion most aloof in moral superiority is generally always the one least based in reason. Aside from what I've already said, let me explain around this a little more. Let's look at the people with 'controversial' opinions. This might come as a surprise, but people don't believe 'controversial' things just for the hell of it, or because they like being put in jeopardy of losing their friends or jobs. If you're going to sacrifice your good name for the sake of some political opinion, you generally have some pretty damned good reasons to believe it. On the other hand, if you believe something that just confirms public dogma, you don't need to know what you're talking about, because you can just do what Christopher Hitchens called "tak[ing] refuge in the false security of consensus." And again, since you haven't thought through that belief, you have to rely on moral blackmail and shaming when confronted. As Socrates said, "When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser." And for those of consensus opinion, there was never a debate, so slander is the first and only line of defense.
The pearl-clutching tendency of offendedness is very much a natural defense in all times and places, but it should be obvious that it's a uniquely acute as a collective problem in the contemporary West. Now most morally mature people should feel pretty mentally imprisoned here at the start of 2016. We (at least non-Europeans) live in a time of significant freedom of speech in the legal domain, but basically none in the social domain.
Indeed we have whole domain called "Identity Politics" where we knowingly shed reason for competitive pity-pitching, where failure to live up to a very narrow, disconnected and extreme elite ideology earns one the typical avalanche of accusations of racism, misogyny, homophobia, what-have-you. In the past decades, Identity Politics has come consume more and more of the rest of politics so that it is nearly impossible to talk about taxes, healthcare, the environment or anything without someone positing roundabout ways dissenting views can be construed as being offensive personal attacks.
This kind of offendedness, which often takes on the robes of offendedness on the behalf of others, is not only prevalent, but is very unsubtly being taught as a virtue.
There's additionally a sense in which perceived persecution...