Social taboos against unpopular opinions may not rise to the level of criminalization, but that doesn&#x27;t mean they are all perfectly acceptable. The Hollywood blacklist wasn&#x27;t a government action nor was it a violation of free speech in the legal sense, but that didn&#x27;t make it a good or even an acceptable thing. Actually, we consider it a great scandal when screenwriters are blacklisted from their livelihood for expressing sympathies with Stalin, but we don&#x27;t bat an eye when a tech executive is hounded out of his job because he backed the wrong California proposition a few years ago and refuses to comment on the issue today. One of these is called &quot;McCarthyism&quot; and the other is called &quot;political correctness&quot;, and it&#x27;s hard for me to see a world where one is okay and the other is not, unless of course we live in a world where denying legal marriage to same sex couples is worse than Stalinism.