The below is a response I posted on Facebook to a friend who had made the threat to withdraw his friendship from anyone who didn't agree with his viewpoint on a particular social question, and had compared those who disagreed with him to those who stood against women's rights and agaisnt the rights of people of different ethnicities to marry.  While usually these posts are a bit on the lighter side, I thought this was important enough to be set out for you to see.

FYI: the names of others have been changed to protect the innocent.

Not mine.  I'm not that innocent.  ;o)

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John, at the risk of (hopefully not) endangering our long friendship, when re-reading your response to me, something came to mind: While I have many friends (and family) who are gay and, in some cases, married, I do not agree with the idea that the current discourses about the rights of homosexuals can or should be analogized to the rights of women to vote or - especially - to the anti-miscegenation laws overturned by Loving v. Virginia.*

To do so is to use analogy as politics; to seek to quell dissenting opinion by using an analogy that has as its logical conclusion the fact that anyone who would stand on the other end of the socio-political spectrum from you must also be someone who would have been a wife beater or a member of the KKK. It is the rhetorical equivalent to a trial lawyer asking a witness "When did you stop beating your wife?": it is a question (or in this case an analogy) that is designed, not to determine truth, but to decide by fiat.

You speak most eloquently in your other posts of the fact that evil occurs when people are silenced. Yet you by your own verbiage - not to mention your threat to withdraw friendship from others - are seeking by both verbal ploy and outright threat to silence any who might disagree with you. This is not only a bad way to "win" an argument (it is designed to make it one-sided, after all, so not much actual argument can be had), but it is also goes a long way toward finding bad answers. For just as I dismiss those who hold up signs that say "God hats Fa**ots" as being hate- and fear-filled people who will not aid me in finding any kind of Truth, so do I dismiss people on the opposite side of the spectrum who call anyone and everyone who opposes them such horrific things as "bigot," "homophobe," "hate-monger," (and the list goes on forever) without recognizing the possibility that at least some of those people may have reasoned and rationally thought out opinions that bear up under not only private scrutiny but public debate. ... See More

But again, debate (in the friendly, "Let us reason together and find what is Right" sense of the term) is impossible when one person starts out by saying a) if you disagree with me you're a bad - EVIL - person and b) if you disagree with me I won't be your friend and we can't talk anymore.

It is the adult version of taking your ball away and going home to make sure you won't lose the game.  And no offence, but if the only way you can keep from losing is to leave the game, then I suspect your cause is doomed from the start.

* For those who don't know, this was the Supreme Court case which determined it was unConstitutional to forbid people of different ethnicities (in that particular case a white man and a black woman) from marrying.