A clash of absolutes

Though ostensibly limited to religiously motivated cases in the present flap, the position of the hard right, shorn of obfuscation and denial, is and has always been that there is a private right to choose ad lib with whom to deal or not in the marketplace or any private association or organization, for any reason good or bad or for none at all, that ought to be protected, and that there is no right not to be excluded or disadvantaged by such unfettered choice.

This remains the orthodox libertarian and conservative view among purists, though nowadays most libertarians and most conservatives dare to assert the right only more narrowly in connection with religiously motivated cases and only in connection with homosexuality and same-sex marriage.

Since the days of the civil rights revolution the position of the left has been that there is a human right not to be excluded or even disadvantaged in the market or in some other types of private associations or organizations for reasons of race or for certain other reasons (the list is open-ended and grows slowly), and that no private right to exclude or disadvantage persons for such reasons exists.

At the present day it seems most Americans take a view considerably closer to that of the left than of the most orthodox right as regards exclusion or disadvantage, at least as regards employment in most kinds of positions if not as regards every facet of the market and not as regards every form of private association or organization, on the basis of race or, for that matter, sex or even sexual preference.

But they mostly want to allow religiously motivated refusals to participate in same-sex marriages.

A relevant point that seems never to be considered is that the burdens of exclusion of blacks in the South back in the day were economically, politically, and culturally crippling to the blacks and the burdens of constrained non-exclusion imposed on whites were comparatively slight, while the case is egregiously quite otherwise as regards religiously motivated refusals to participate in gay marriages.