To the Left, failure to support their agenda is tantamount to support for murder. There are no conservative Americans who oppose same-sex marriage yet believe that gays and lesbians should not be murdered at nightclubs; there are no Christian Americans who don’t think men should enter women’s bathrooms, but also think that people who suffer from gender-identity disorder ought not be shot to death by a rampaging Muslim terrorist. There are no shades of gray in the Left’s view of the Right — we disagree, and thus we are evil.

That’s because the Left doesn’t believe in the basic concept of rights. The Left believes that you have a right to behave as they say you should behave — no more, no less. This is why the Left supports regulations on hate speech; they don’t agree that you have a right to say things that make people feel bad. That’s being a bad person, and the government shouldn’t let you be a bad person. This is why the Left thinks that private businesses have no right to discriminate in choosing their clientele — unless, of course, the Left is choosing which states to boycott for political purposes. The shibboleth so often parroted by the Left — “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” — no longer applies.

The Left projects its own view of rights onto the Right, imagining that if the Right disagrees with any particular views or behavior, it must want to stamp out the people who propagate them.

And this funhouse mirror-image rightly scares them. It scares them so much that they have to routinely demand government coercion.