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From one point of view, if you can only join a group you support wholeheartedly then you will either never join any group or can only join small single issue groups.
And I know several gay people for whom gay marriage is not even in the top ten of their personal big issues. They would like to have it but other issues are more important to them. I know one gay man back in Seattle who is essentially a single issue voter. If you're not pro-life you aren't getting his vote. He's not religious at all, but has just reached the personal moral conclusion that after conception, a fetus is something worthy of legal protection and that worthiness is more important than just about anything else he can think of.
Is that hypocrisy to be gay but not consider gay rights the most important issue, or is it just a different prioritization than yours? Perhaps for this man, the Republican position on the war is more important than the position on gay rights. Or he thinks it is an important issue but doesn't agree that one party is more likely to produce the desired result than the other (or perhaps Republicans are more likely to be the tipping point in a kind of "only Nixon could go to China" and my view that only the Republicans could get a black elected president).
While both parties are big buckets containing people with a wide range of views, I do think that overall the left has a bit more of a tendency to say "you're with me on everything or you not with me at all" than the right (though there are plenty of examples of such factions on either side). In the end it all settles down to arguments about which end of the egg to break and whether you can live with the other viewpoint or it means war (figuratively or literally).
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