True Con, the difference is that the majority of your battles are ideological, almost abstract.

Let's say you own 10 guns. Any gun control legislation passed will A) probably not affect those guns you own and B) probably just prevent you from purchasing weapons specifically designed to murder large numbers of people (armor-piercing rounds, AK-47s, etc.) Additionally, let's say you live in a rural area, with thinly-spread services like police and animal control, so you really need a gun to live. Your situation bears little to no resemblance to someone who lives within a mile of a million people and 10,000 police officers. In the urban situation, guns are a huge problem because people get them in large quantities and form their own extra-national groups and follow their own laws - they're called gangs.

Let's say you're gay and just got married in Massachusetts. Any 'Defense of Marriage' type law or amendment passed will do the following: negate your health benefits, negate your spousal death benefits, negate your ability to make decisions regarding your spouse's health and care, and many other benefits and advantages of marriage.

Now, let's say you sit on your hands and don't actively hate gay people; you take a wait and see attitude. Well, during that time thousands of LGBT people will have had to expatriate to be with their spouses (they'll move away because pretty much every other 1st world nation provides civil union benefits to gay partners), tens of thousands of gays will be thrown out of their houses, families and jobs because of discrimination, thousands of teenagers will kill themselves because they are attracted to the same sex, and so on.

So you see, on just this one key progressive issue versus your key conservative issue, the stakes are significantly different. If you find us impatient for you to come around, that's because frankly we don't respect bigotry or demagoguery or theocracy. And, honestly, I find it offensive that I am going to have to live part of my life as part of a citizen just because you and your ilk get the heebie-jeebies when you think of me kissing my partner.

You "accepting the will of the majority" rarely effects your life in the least. On the other hand, for us to accept your will is to consciously allow ourselves to be dehumanized and marginalized. These "public policy preferences", unsterilized, are the lives of millions of people just as American as you. And yes, to make those lives worth living, I will steamroll over any conservative with a cackle in my throat and a sparkle in my eye, and I will do it in any way that I can.