I do wish they were applied reflectively and consistently in any case.

Sure, me too.
While I'm at it, I have other implausible wishes I'd love to have granted.

In the meantime, I generally assume that whenever an organization has a "let's not talk about X because that always leads to unproductive/unpleasant discussions" norm (which is usually), there's a space of privileged positions about X implicit in the resulting conversations which cannot be challenged.