JGWeissman:

You seem to be restating your position, without actually addressing my point that a policy that takes into account the likely behaviours of LW members of various levels of skill and experience, including those who have recently joined, does not reflect on the capabilities of the experienced, high level members.

I don't see how this objection is specific to sensitive topics. Assuming that regular participants maintain high enough standards, incompetent attempts by newbies to comment on sensitive topics should be effectively discouraged by downvoting, as in all other debates. Even in the most innocent technical discussions, things will go downhill if there is no mechanism in place to discourage unproductive and poorly thought out comments. In either case, if the voting system is ineffective, it means that more stringent moderation is in order.

On the other hand, if even the behavior of regular participants is problematic, then we get back to the problems I was writing about.