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I don't know about "out of left field", but I've seen many people use it to justify being retaliatory. "They treated me this way and did a horrible thing, so this is the way they want to be treated! I'm going to do it right back to them!" That's literally against what the rule says. That's just you giving them permission to continue.
In fact, I think that's depressingly common.
Not exactly what you asked, but your question reminded me of this post I came across a while ago:
What's the most corrupt/misguided/peculiar way you've seen the golden rule used?
golden rule (...) can be summed up as "treat others how you want to be treated"
That must have been last Friday night when I saw a masochist severely beating a random guy on a street.
It's frequently used as an excuse to berate "sinners," with the excuse that they would want someone to confront them about their sins and lead them to Jesus.
I'm going to use Kant's categorical imperative, because I think that it's written a little more-rigorously than most forms of the Golden Rule, so it's easier to reason about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative
Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
— Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
The problem here is that I'm pretty sure that you can always rewrite a rule that doesn't conform to the categorical imperative to a form such that it does.
For example, take gay marriage. Some people who are upset about it have argued that not allowing gay marriage does treat everyone in the same way: anyone, homosexual or not, can marry someone of the other sex.
You could have a law "Someone who wants to do so can marry an adult that they are attracted to. This law does not apply to homosexuals." That won't pass the categorical imperative; it doesn't apply to homosexuals. You can rewrite that to be "Anyone may marry someone of the other sex", and now it does, though the effect is the same.
Maybe it's not legal to prevent blacks from voting, but for a while, under Jim Crow laws, literacy tests were used -- exploiting the fact that literacy among blacks was lower -- to partially disenfranchise blacks in the US.
That is, I get the idea behind the Golden Rule. But I have a hard time seeing how you can come up with some kind of a legalistic, mechanical test that can't be gamed. I can always make the conditions for some rule that contains no group-specific restrictions sufficiently restrictive in other ways that in effect, they apply only to that group.
exploiting the fact that literacy among blacks was lower
That wasn't the exploit. The exploit was twofold:
some political leaders follow the "gold-and-rule" so there's that.
on a more local level, neurotic SOs will return social embarassments with a bigger social + maybe internet drama. 🍿
