How I hope Mr DeSantis is even half of what the Left fears he is.
It's wonderful to watch these people, whose minions physically attack conservative rallies, howl down conservative speakers on university campuses, fire professors who manifest Oldthinking ... suddenly become civil libertarians.
If a Leftist-dominated government cancelled the contract of, say, MyPillow, because it was racist-fascist-sexist-homophobic blah blah blah, they wouldn't turn a hair. In fact, they'd cheer.
However. So long as we are not in a shooting war, we must uphold the Rule of Law. (In war, "the laws are silent", as the old Roman said. But even there we want to keep to the appropriate laws when we can.)
So principled conservatives need to have a discussion about this and establish some guidelines.
One the one hand, we want the operation of the state to be neutral. To take a closely-analogous case, we would not want a government to make support for a particular political party a condition of employment for ordinary government jobs. (I'm not talking about heading departments, where incoming administrations will of course appoint those who agree with their programs.) That would take us down the road to becoming a banana republic.
On the other hand, we definitely want people applying for even ordinary government jobs to meet certain criteria. For example, someone applying for a job to teach young children who openly says that they believe sex with children is permissible, shouldn't be hired.
A company that openly says it will not hire people of a certain ethnicity is another example. Or one with close links to potential foreign enemies.
There isn't a hard-and-fast criterion here. There will be grey areas, where an individual, or a company, seeking to do business with, or to be hired by, the government, has opinions, or carries out actions, that are borderline -- not quite normal political partisanship, but not quite open attacks on what we all agree -- or used to agree -- are fundamental, decent, social norms.
There are people on the Right who disagree with Mr DeSantis:
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We -- people on the Right -- need to have a discussion to try to establish some principled guidelines on this issue. (One thing that makes this case difficult is that the Left is moving pretty rapidly away from what used to be agreed social norms. They're heading towards the sexualization of children, the discouragement of normal sexual orientation. Even ten years ago, this would not have arisen: the issue of child sex was one of the few that absolutely united Left and Right. But no longer.)
There is always a temptation to use the power of the state to punish our political enemies. Generally, this is a bad idea. But life is sometimes complicated. Plus, as a nation, we're drifting away from the sort of civil society where both sides play by the rules, and we need not continue to be Mr Nice Guy when the other side begins to hit below the belt.
Prayed day and night for them!
