Generalization

One of the things that annoys me about the "culture wars" is how quick each side is to generalize their opponents. Take, for example, this article that says that the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty is looking to take out ads in the New York Times calling the recent anti-Prop8 demonstrations violent.
I take issue with this because, despite some unfortunate events, the protests have been incredibly civil. I mean, please consider that these protests were born within hours of the final results of the election and took place with almost no organizing. There has been no "leader" for the LGBTA community to follow. And yet, despite tens of thousands of people protesting all over the US, there has only been a handful of complaints. That kind of behaviour from a community that is both scared and angry impresses me a lot.
Not only that, but Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters dissects the few complaints that there are, and it seems likely that some were exaggerated, and some were instigated by Prop8 proponents acting just as bad.
Here is an example of what I'm talking about. It's an article from One News Now, a news website for made for Christians (more on that some other time...). A young man was drugged and murdered by an older man, who is gay. It was, needless to say, a tragedy. ONN highlights a comment by one Diane Gramely, who wonders why the LGBTA ("homosexual," in her words) community hasn't been up in arms about it.
But this is the problem. The man is gay; why does that make the LGBTA community responsible for his actions? How do the actions of one individual automatically reflect on an entire community? What about this story, where a heterosexual couple kept a teenage boy in captivity for a year? Should we be expecting an apology from the heterosexual community? The married community? Of course not, because their actions reflect their own (twisted) lives and not necessarily anyone else's.
But often, people do take the actions of one person or few people and assume that it reflects on other people they share one or two characteristics with. It's shotty logic, and it shouldn't be done by anyone out of middle school.