The allergy to elemental distinctions is not confined to child educators and their admirers. It also turns up on the political front, even among presidential candidates. This is the language of moral equivalence. What was most disturbing about this affair was not the excesses of an extremist, but how his candidate parsed the problem, and worse, who uncritically that rendering was received. It is certainly not inborn.
Children can make elementary distinctions between say, threatener and threatened.
Moral blindness of this caliber requires practice. It has to be learned. If you are not sure make an educated guess. After forty years of long twilight struggle, one feels one has had enough. And when the easy distinctions become too much, the hard ones, like choosing one group of guerrillas over another in a murky Third World struggle, become intolerable.