Every problem stems from roughly half the population fearing the idea of people and practices that are different from their own. It feels like addressing any other problem is palliative. There has to be a way to improve this.
Our prejudices tend to be hard earned, life beats them into us and that makes it difficult to acknowledge that the other side is somewhat correct even if they are wrong in most every way. Extremists have bits of truth in their views; their failing is that they use those bits of truth to validate their extremism, the fault of the rest is in using extremism to invalidate those bits of truth.
It's not so much the fear and prejudice that's the problem; it's the idea that violence (or the threat of violence) is an acceptable way to force others to do what we want. You might think that most people don't think violence is acceptable, but every time someone says "there ought to be a law..." they are implicitly accepting the the use of force.
