What the OP is advocating is intellectual and moral cowardice. I don’t care what the issue is, this is less excusable than any position I might disagree with.
But, if you have neighbors that make threats of defensible gun violence for simply disagreeing with them, how do you handle that? Because everyday i make advances in progressive thought, I have people here threatening me with violence in America… It just makes me more radical.
I suppose you two are right. Doing nothing is like supporting the status quo. Though, if the subject matter is somewhat distant to you, you may not be much affected by it and thus be less willing to change or resist the status quo. I think such a position is faulty, because it is letting the wrongful with incorrect opinions to take advantage of politics and other people. Yet, you can’t really lock all your opponents in prison either for their beliefs and philosophies. Perhaps, it is best to understand why conservatives insist on these inaccurate or incomplete data, so it would be possible to find a better way to correct their erroneous worldview. I believe I have read somewhere in the news about creationists and how they may be afraid of what the creationist-evolution controversy is philosophically about, in their opinion, and the article concludes that, if we could understand their psychology, then we can correct their worldview or way of thinking.