I have a loving heart and an open mind.

Those two qualities pull against each other more often than they're credited for.

Warmth wants to agree. Openness means sitting with somebody whose view you think is plainly wrong, and staying curious about how they got there.

A dinner table is where it gets tested, usually around the second course, usually with a relative. The easy move is to go quiet and privately file them under lost cause.

The harder one is a real question — not the rhetorical kind, the kind you'd want answered. It rarely converts anybody. It does keep the person in the room, which is the only condition under which anyone has ever changed their mind about anything.