With many political matters, though, people inherently have to hold positions by virtue of the fact that the issues affect their material interests. You need to remain open in spite of that, but there are also limits to how open one can be when someone else is arguing that you should lose your job or that your health insurance should be able to deny you coverage for care, or maybe that you are culturally or genetically inherently stupid or incapable of self-governance.
Not all controversial matters are political. For instance, it's not inherently political whether global warming is real or whether vaccines work in curtailing a pandemic. Only a certain side in these debates wants to reduce arguments in which there is rational evidence (and important actions to be taken) to something that is merely "political", and therefore a just a matter of constitutional free speech and action.
