That is a red herring. It is the most popular one the left uses when an organization they run exceeds its brief. Another:
"Dissent is not unamerican."
In neither case are they wrong. Organizations experience dissatisfaction with their membership, and dissent is not unamerican.
Do you still have a sour taste in your mouth, even after these logical and true statements to explain the problem? I've been thinking there is a switch inside each human being's head that is tripped when a person hears horsesh**. It's the iron-clad horsesh** detector and we all have one. It goes off when some intellectual zigs when people expect a zag. We'll take the zig but the detector follows the zag. So we'll follow what they're saying but in the back of our minds is the sensation that we've just been duped.
1) "Every organization experiences disagreement." That has nothing to do with the reason behind the complaint. It does not explain anything away. It does not excuse politicizing the NEA. It does not excuse any of the myriad other political programs the NEA has undertaken since it was founded. And it does not have anything to do with the reason people have a problem with what the NEA has just done. My horsesh** detector started shaking when I got to "That is the greatness of an open, democratic organization such as ours." Consider it old experience, but people who would do what the NEA leaders did in the original article, and then paraphrase American founders... it burns out capillaries in my brain.
2) "Dissent is not unamerican." Dissent is not the point of the reaction against the act, it's the material of that dissent. To stand up on a corner and shout your beliefs - that is not unamerican, but that is also just a person on a corner shouting their beliefs. We don't know what he/she thinks from the example, but on the face of it there isn't anything wrong with that action. When people excoriate them for the content of their speech they say, "I'm dissenting, I have the right." They have the right, but they take it a step further and try to tell people they have the right to be correct. They have the idea that dissent is agreement and will coerce it with bad logic. The rest think of us think that is horsesh**, but maybe we don't know exactly why it's horsesh**.
I watched John Kerry on the Dick Cavett show recently as he debated John O'Neill about American armed forces in Vietnam. Kerry was eloquent and composed, much more than he is now while campaigning. He also used one red herring after another, while John O'Neill was direct (but perhaps a little beligerent). I admit being impressed with Kerry, probably because I've watched him closely during the campaign and saw how bad he's done. I thought if he could recover the composure he had during his anti-Vietnam days he would make some real headway. He would lose in the end of course, but at least it would be a little sporting.
(Footnote: I am not a lawyer. I'm just a conservative living in San Francisco. I do not agree that conservatives should leave here because the place doesn't agree with the way we think. Consider me a one-man sleeper cell).