I fully agree that critiques of ID are often expressed in ways that are unhelpful. It’s a big bugbear of mine—when it’s dismissed as “religion, not science” or “introducing religious presuppositions into science,” or with appeals to the First Amendment or Kitzmiller v Dover. The US Constitution may have a lot of value in the eyes of many, but it is not a part of the Bible (or of any other sacred scripture), it is not the ultimate authority on what is real and what isn’t, and in fact for those of us on the other side of The Pond™, it is completely irrelevant.
Having said that, there is a tendency for many ID proponents to respond to the theory of evolution in particular with misleading or inaccurate claims. One example is irreducible complexity: as far as I have been able to establish, their most well known examples of IC such as the bacterial flagellum have been shown not to be irreducibly complex after all. There are also times when I get the impression that I’m reading tabloid rhetoric and name calling rather than scholarly analysis. I see this for example in their tendency to use the word “Darwinism” to describe what they are attacking: this is what is known as a weasel word, because while at first glance it sounds like it means something specific, in practice it is so ambiguous that it is quite possible to say that you reject “Darwinism” while accepting the universal common ancestry of humans, animals, and all life on Earth.
ID proponents need to tone down the rhetoric, come clean on exactly what aspects of the theory of evolution they are rejecting, and make sure that the claims they are making in support of their positions are accurate. ID critics, on the other hand, need to focus on the question of whether or not ID proponents are getting their facts straight, and leave objections based on politics or religion out of it.