Here’s a species of rhetoric I find confusing, and which I associate with social conservatives although it isn’t exclusive to them: complaining on the grounds of your right to have an opinion, in a way that seems out of order with the opinion itself.
Suppose a practice I really really disapprove of, say marital rape for example, came to be both legally endorsed and that questioning of it, in educated circles, came to be regarded as socially unacceptable if not subject to formal censure. That would be bad! But it would be bad more or less because it facilitated a practice that was evil. The victims of such a policy wouldn’t really be feminists qua persons who disapprove of marital rape, but married women and (for practical purposes not as typically, but no less truthfully when they were) men either subject directly to such violence or modifying their behavior in the threat of it.
Sometimes I see opponents of (e.g.) gay rights directly stating their case. But more often I see them complaining that they are censured qua gay rights opponent, and that there should be more diversity of opinion in the public sphere, or that private beliefs shouldn’t be subject to public censure, arguments that take the belief as a sort of free-floating ascriptive status which we must not use as a basis of discrimination (you can of course point out apparent hypocrisy in either direction but I find those kinds of accusations uninteresting, so.)
This could be a run around the censors, by focusing on the censorship itself, such that everyone knows what you mean - where an Englishman says “we should repeal the law against advocating a republic” and everybody can probably guess that he means that we should have republic. (Are those laws actually enforced? Do they even exist? Whatever, it’s just an example so facticity conveniently doesn’t matter.) But the thing about censorship-by-social approval (aside from being an organic feature of legally free speech itself) is that if your audience knows what you mean, so do the soi-disant censors, by definition.
(For the record I find this kind of thing as noisome when I agree with the object-level claim as when I oppose it: complaining about how one can’t criticize Israel, for instance. Just directly say what you mean rather than grandstanding about how brave you are!)
Short version: often this is an identity thing, specifically a defense against a perceived assault on group identity fixtures.
In many cases, someone who cares about being (e.g.) a “traditionalist Christian” doesn’t actually care about changing policy vis-a-vis gay people nearly as much as he cares about his ability to say that he doesn’t approve of homosexuality without suffering massive blowback, his ability to teach his kids his preferred anti-gay ideals and to pass on this cultural marker, his ability to Stand Tall as a Traditionalist Christian and live a life of public dignity, etc. To him, while the actual policy change itself is noisome, the change in discursive standards is vastly worse. In one case it affects mostly a bunch of people with whom he doesn’t interact; in the other it affects him and the people closest to him, constantly.