The modern social liberalism is a negation of pluralism and ultimately the death of our Bill or RIghts

The left loves diversity - until it comes in conflict with what they see as their 'social justice reform' agenda. Increasingly they are conflating equality of status and equality of choice - the first - which fought racism and sexism is widely recognized as returning to people the basic rights that they were denied for so long. The second, involving certain avant garde lifestyle choices usually revolving around sexuality seeks to extend the same 'rights' against discrimination as the status minorities receive.

But it is fundamentally different. No longer are we warring against discrimination that is based upon who we are, instead we are setting up a war between competing philosophies of how we should live and having the state with all its guns, shackles and steel boxes validate one and persecute the other. This is madness and the antithesis of liberty, because if people are free at all, they must be free to espouse and undertake their own version of the ‘good life’. For example, it is not invidious for a beautiful lesbian to refuse to date a man. She refuses because her definition of what is true and good for her excludes participating in certain activities with heterosexual men. It would be tyranny and involuntary servitude to tell her she musn’t discriminate against men in her personal relationships. Likewise, someone that provides services of a particular, custom nature like a photographer or a caterer should have the right to serve or not serve events based upon their definition of the good life. As Erick Erickson would say: I have no right to refuse to sell a Gay couple a cake but I have every right to refuse to design and make a cake for a Gay marriage that I believe is wrong.

This freedom to live one’s life as one chooses and to associate with whom they will (or won’t) is critical to functioning of our democratic republic. If only to ensure that social ‘innovations’ are tested and not simply adopted because an elite thought they were 'swell'. Because the avant garde has a history of pitching rotten 'solutions' like eugenics and socialism and concentration camps for backward natives and racial enemies. Ross Douthat has a lot to say about this in the NYT:

In a “defense” of religious liberty that’s basically written to reassure liberals that they can support something called religious freedom without conceding an inch to actual-existing dissenters from liberalism’s preferred legal and regulatory regime, Emily Bazelon offers a formulation that hints at why religious and ideological pluralism, so honored in theory, is often hard for people to get behind in practice:

On these two fronts [same-sex marriage and the HHS mandate], religious liberty looks like a shield fundamentalists are throwing up against, well, sexual modernity. They’re not ready to accept same-sex marriage or sex without procreation, and they’re arguing that fundamentalist-owned businesses, as well as individuals and churches, shouldn’t have to.

All of this is giving religious liberty a bad name …

But why a “bad name”? If we take pluralism seriously, the whole point of the concept is to enable groups to “throw up a shield” against the pressure of consensus, and develop and promote alternatives that are rejected by the powerful, or by society as a whole. This is true when the consensus in question is old and rooted and traditional, but it’s also true when the consensus in question likes to describe itself as representing “modernity” (or “progress” or “enlightenment” or whatever loaded, whiggish word you prefer), because vanguard-of-history ideas no less than rooted-in-tradition ideas can turn out to be mistaken, misdirected, immoral, barbaric. (I shouldn’t need to rehearse all of the examples of thoroughly “modern” ideas from the 19th and 20th centuries that today’s liberals quite rightly find abhorrent.) And one of the advantages that pluralism offers to modern societies in particular is a kind of hedge against the progressive fallacy — a way for a culture rushing to embrace a new paradigm to concede, along the way, the possibility that it might be making a mistake, and that even capital-p Progress might benefit from having critics.

But this is where the problem comes in. Because as Bazelon’s blithe (and increasingly typical) dismissal of current religious-liberty concerns suggests, it’s precisely when people in liberal societies see themselves as out on the vanguard of history that they’re least likely to concede that they might, just might, be making a mistake, and most inclined to feel instead that the thing to do is shatter the shield wall around the remaining bastions of unenlightenment rather than permit them to persist. It’s when a consensus is at its most self-confident, in other words — and therefore most vulnerable to the errors of overconfidence — that the kind of pluralism that might serve as a corrective becomes hardest for that consensus’s exponents to accept.

To see this problem in microcosm, consider the case of American universities, which are notionally bastions of a depoliticized pluralism — miniature societies whose only official commitment is to free inquiry and intellectual diversity — but which somehow tend to end up containing fewer real divisions than the society they exist to educate and serve. Not that American academia isn’t pluralistic in some sense: There are plenty of competing ideas and warring schools of thought on college campuses, and plenty of forms of diversity represented in their faculties. But this is usually a pluralism of the already-acceptable, not the genuinely challenging, and as such it tends to evaporate when it seems to conflict with the (left-liberal, secular, liberationist) ideas that the academic community holds most dear.

You can see this dynamic at work with conservative Christian groups on a number of elite campuses right now — precisely because of issues related to “sexual modernity,” their ability to invite speakers, find advisers andgain university recognition is being chipped away at and constrained. (This chipping-away often involves demanding that religious groups promise not to discriminate on the basis of beliefs or behavior — a rule that’s allegedly intended to encourage pluralism within campus organizations, but has the actual-practical effect of reducing the space for ideological diversity writ large.) But even when the pressure is more informal, the effect is similar: Pluralism is absent or limited on our allegedly freethinking campuses precisely in those arenas where a robust theory of pluralism-as-social-good suggests it would be most valuable.

We cannot afford an avant garde orthodoxy that steamrolls all opinions and choices about how to live in the name of 'diversity' or 'inclusion'. Establishing a uniform public belief system that deviations from are punished in order to protect private choices is a ludicrous oxymoron of a political philosophy. People have the right. Must have the right to think for themselves and choose and in choosing have the right to behave consistent with their choices. The liberal war against conscience is nothing less than a war against free minds and ultimately free people. It cannot be 'compromised' on. The difference can not be split.