Reflections, Reflections

Comment at Volokh:

Public_Defender:

The difficulty with gay rights issues is that your perspective on the merits determines your perspective on the rules of discussion.

All conversations have rules. All decent people would agree that it's OK to criticize pedophiles. All sane people would also agree that we have the right to punish* others (at least socially) for racist or anti-Semitic comments

If being gay is morally the equivalent of being Jewish, then it's OK to punish anti-gay comments. Wouldn’t everyone agree that a librarian should at least be criticized for trying include a book that treated Judaism as an evil on the Freshman reading list? But if you take the perspective that being gay is itself immoral, then a whole different set of rules apply.

Can anyone come up with a system of rules of discussion that does not depend on the speaker's view of the underlying merits?

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Regarding:
All decent people would agree that it's OK to criticize pedophiles.

Whence we conclude the American Psychological Association has been recently ruled by people who lack the most basic decency.

The APA took pedophilia out of the DSM, relatively at the same time they took out homosexuality. (And after the scandal that ensued, they flip-flopped on the issue).

Which follows that their categorization of mental disorder or lack of character is neither very sane, nor decent.