I think it irritates me so much because folks seem to assume it's simply never occurred to me.
No, it irritates me so much because I knew that's what you would use to defend yourself. I anticipated it in that "gish gallop" that you axiomatically would other anyone that disagreed with you as "intolerate", and that would axiomatically make you in the right. I could have put money on the fact that you'd pull out Popper's Paradox.
The problem is that in this case it is bull crap.
I had an interesting experience on Enworld a few days ago. I got into a conversation about the nature of chaotic clergies, and whether a religion could be non-hierarchical with someone I couldn't recall ever interacting with before.
In that conversation, at one point he out of the blue related almost all of my life story. He got a few details of it wrong, but the substance of it was largely correct. I was baffled. How in the world did someone I'd never interacted with no so many intimate details of my life. I have friends I game with that probably don't know parts of that background. He explained that he had went back looking for my writing, and had pieced it together from these sorts of controversies. And I started thinking about that, and the times I'd said things about myself at EnWorld and invariably they were of this structure. Someone would say to me, "If you disagree with me, it has to be that you are afraid of strong women." And I would say, "That's ridiculous. If you knew me, you'd know that I married a woman with a PhD who is a long distance runner, and that one of the things that attracted me was that she was a non-retiring, opinionated woman, who wouldn't fully subordinate herself to me as was the typical expectation in the culture I grew up in." Or someone would say to me, "You just hate black people.", and I would have to explain, "How can you make that claim when you know nothing about me? When I was a kid, my doctor, my teacher, my pastor, my best friend, and indeed just about everyone I knew and everyone I loved outside of my immediate family had 'black' skin?"
At this point on EnWorld, that crap has happened so often that a complete stranger can reconstruct much of my life story just by browsing the forum. Yes, it's a lame debate tactic to try to say anything about who you are in reality in an internet debate where nothing can be verified, but given that I find myself continually arguing with someone whose mode of argumentation is "I know you are wrong because of who you are." or "You are inherently wrong because of who I think you are.", it's all I've got. So now, here we are again. Let me make it really clear. I had a gay black man and his lover as players in my group for like 4 years before they moved across country. I love that person. I broke bread with him. I gamed with him. I fellowshipped with him. If the basis of your argument, is I am 'intolerate' or trying to 'exclude' someone from gaming, or that I'm trying to defend people excluding people from gaming, you're already wrong. The whole basis of your logic is flawed. You've cut the world into pieces and you've thrown everyone into your boxes and labels, and generally speaking when people do that they surprise, surprise, give themselves the most self-flattering labels. They put themselves on "team nice", and then axiomatically everyone else is wrong.