It's become a "dog whistle" issue because there is a perception that some activists may use CoC-type documents to deny contributors' ability to freely engage in political speech in other, unrelated, contexts. The worry is that this in turn will lead to either witch hunts or chilling effects, which are viewed as at odds with modern Western political free speech culture.
Many people feel uncomfortable with this as a concept, regardless of whether they agree with the ideas in question. They point out that this effect may well reduce the contributor pool in much the same way that a particularly harsh technical culture (eg LKML) might do, i.e. it ends up substituting one disincentive to participate with another for no net gain.
On the other side, some people argue that the speech they are concerned about is not "political" and that it is right that it should be punished beyond simple disagreement.
At first blush, this might seem rather tangential to the issue at hand. But there are some high profile examples of this actually having happened - see [1], or the example of Brendan Eich at Mozilla.
[1] https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941
Many people feel uncomfortable with this as a concept, regardless of whether they agree with the ideas in question. They point out that this effect may well reduce the contributor pool in much the same way that a particularly harsh technical culture (eg LKML) might do, i.e. it ends up substituting one disincentive to participate with another for no net gain.
On the other side, some people argue that the speech they are concerned about is not "political" and that it is right that it should be punished beyond simple disagreement.
At first blush, this might seem rather tangential to the issue at hand. But there are some high profile examples of this actually having happened - see [1], or the example of Brendan Eich at Mozilla.
[1] https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941