There are times when a rationalist approach to societal and cultural issues (and political issues, as they bleed into that) may be more or less acceptable to the public, and I think we are unfortunately at a time where those approaches don't work very well, and indeed are seen as attacks themselves.

I have all sorts of poorly founded ideas on why that might be so, which themselves might be more symptoms than causes, but the bottom line is the same; It's very hard to have a rational discussion between two parties with different points of view these days. I find that one or both will usually have underlying beliefs based on dogma that they refuse to entertain any discussion on, which makes discussing views founded on those beliefs extremely hard to do constructively, if not impossible.