TAC’s Leah Libresco examines the latest intense fights on the culture war front, with people on left and right trying to deny their culture-war enemies the right to work. She writes:

Balkanized businesses, which only hire employees or leaders that are politically palatable to their donors and customers aren’t economically or socially efficient. Instead of creating weak-tie relationships across ideological divides, they segregate people who disagree, fostering a fear of contamination by association. This exclusionary approach raises the stakes of political conflict dangerously high. When the losing side of a debate is blacklisted, all disputes become wars of annihilation.

I can understand the rationale for WorldVision’s donors protesting the Evangelical charity’s decision on same-sex partner benefits allowing those in same-sex marriages to keep working for them, because WorldVision is a church-based organization with a mission explicitly grounded in Christianity. It’s harder for me to grasp why people protesting the Mozilla big donating $1,000 to Prop 8 years ago believe that justifies trying to destroy his (entirely secular) business to make him pay for his political sin. Still, I generally endorse Leah’s point. I have long objected to the annual March For Life’s shunning of gay pro-lifers, and I think CPAC’s objection to gay conservatives’ presence is foolish and wrong. Of course lines defending moral principle must be drawn somewhere, no matter what your moral principles are (liberal or conservative). But by drawing them so broadly and so starkly, in a quest for purity, we are making this a harder country for all of us to live in together. From the right, the thing that’s so infuriating is the Left uses the rhetoric of diversity to justify its radical intolerance, and crushing of dissent in pursuit of strict uniformity. It’s Orwellian.