[quote=@Penny]We all make moral judgments about people. My point is that we frequently give them a pass on politics because for whatever reason we tend to segregate religious and political opinion from our everyday interactions. I do it all the time, but that persons still believes that thing that I find appalling. Why am I not considering it, and if it reaches whatever threshold I want to set, acting on it.[/quote]


I can totally answer that question.

Because of all the things I've been talking about -- holding Citizen A accountable for Politician B's shortcomings is unfair to Citizen A, etc. BUT ALSO, it's because political bias touches everything. Let's say Fox News reports that Hilary Clinton ate a baby, and CNN reports that Donald Trump sacrificed a kitten to the Mayan god of the apocalypse. Citizen A favors  Fox, and Citizen B favors CNN, and they both know "this probably isn't 100% accurate, but there must be a kernel of truth behind it." Well now both our citizens judge one another for supporting such a terrible person, and then they go shoot up a baseball game and all their buddies alternate between cheering the effort and chastising them for not killing enough political opponents.

....when really, at the end of the day, they both want the same thing (let's have an awesome country). The more passionately they want that, the more likely they are to [i]literally murder[/i] the baby-eater/kitten-sacrificer -- or if not to literally murder them, to just stop talking to one another altogether, and then the divisions deepen from that point forward and the enmity festers until we're right back to murder. Now if you're CNN and/or Fox, you're more or less okay with this -- you don't want people talking to the guys who favor the other side, or they might stop buying your shit. So you just keep stirring the pot. 

If you're an adult, though, you say "Okay, I care about this and I know I care about this and I don't have to prove that to myself or to anyone else. Let's just drink our coffee."