Della,

SNIP
>If the majority of people agreed (or at least didn't complain), the show went on. Now, one bizarre person can single-handedly stop a song or even a whole event.
>
SNIP

I want to comment on the last sentence above.

you are right as I see things, and I suspect that, more often than not, the "bizarreness" has nothing to do with "conviction" but more with testing their own power to cause 'trouble'. They succeed and so do it more often.

There is another thing that I think is similar...
Several years ago doctors came up with cochlear implants for small children. Small children were the target with the reasoning that the "sounds" they heard were certainly very irregular compared to real hearing but they had the best chance of successfully internally translating what they heard to the real meanings of the words they "heard". The device proved to be very successful.

Now here's where the odd part comes in.
There developed a movement (might have been small, but it got lots of publicity) decrying the device on the basis that implanting the device in children was immoral because it removed them from the "culture" (the "deaf culture") into which they were born.
I can only believe that this started as some Seinfeld-like joke but that someone with connections heard it, saw some logic to the argument, started raising hell and getting publicity and that no one dared to argue the point. After all, you'd look like a shmuck. So there developed a 'movement' against cochlear implants in children.

Since I haven't heard (not a sick pun) of it for a while, I guess it died a natural death, but it sure caused grief for lots of parents at the time.

Now I understand that the same thing is proving successful in adults too.