| | Tibor,
As I wrote, the bulk of Yoshino's article makes the point that one should not be compelled to conform to the private stupidities of bigots to serve on a jury, fight as a soldier, or work as an appointed prosecutor for the state - as one is in fact compelled under the existing status quo, a fact of which Yoshino provides more than adequate documentation - and this is a point that really needed to be made. As for "totalitarianism," that is the appropriate label for the erasure of the boundary between the private and consensual on the one hand, and the governmental and coerced on the other.
But people concerned about the loss of private integrity, which inevitably results from being coerced to conform to the bigotries of others, have a point - an ethical one, not a political one, although it legitimately becomes political when the bigotry comes from the government. A private employer's discrimination against people whose sexuality he dislikes should not be criminalized, but it is an irrational behavior, counterproductive to all rational goals - as irrational and counterproductive as the US government's exclusion of homosexuals from our armed forces - and unethical enough to be deserving of available non-coercive sanctions, such as boycott and ostracism, from rational people. As for totalitarianism, as long as other, far more important and more ethically positive private behavior is criminalized (the criminalization of late-term abortions being an obvious example) we do have better examples of totalitarian tendencies on hand.
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