My immediate reaction to reading this was that it was obvious that the particular hot-button issue that inspired it was the recent PUA debate... but I notice nobody else seems to have picked up on that, so now I'm wondering... was that what you had in mind, or am I just being self-obsessed?

(don't worry, I'm not itching to restart that issue, I'm just curious about whether or not I'm imagining things)

ETA: Ok, after reading the rest of the comments more thoroughly, I guess I'm not the only person who figured that was your inspiration.

Personally, I would suggest you use the concrete examples, rather than abstract or hypothetical 'poison-fruit' kind of stories - those things never seem to be effective intuition pumps (for me at least). If you want to avoid the mind-killing effect of a hot-button issue, I think a better idea is just to use multiple concrete examples, and to choose them such that any given person is unlikely to have the same opinion on both of them.