This week we’ve had evidence of two astonishingly rapid tipping points in American public norms, both toward greater equality. In less than twenty years, the United States has moved from the spiteful and misnamed federal Defense of Marriage of Act and a plague of state-level DOMAS that were often worse to a ruling by the Supreme Court that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees a right to state-sanctioned same-sex marriage. In the week since the terrorist attack in Charleston, the longstanding norm tolerating official use of the Confederate battle flag, a flag that has always celebrated white supremacy and racial hierarchy, seems to have crumbled.

Moreover, these are both shifts in favor of equal freedom. Justice Kennedy’s opinion in the same-sex marriage case makes clear that what is at stake is equal access to liberty, the freedom to marry. The Confederacy was devoted, not just to racial inequality, but to slavery, and celebrating slavery belittles the importance of liberty.

These are nice cases to confirm that equality and liberty are deeply allied moral concepts, as the liberal tradition has long held. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Theorists from John Locke to John Rawls have insisted on this connection. Equality denies that some can be masters and others slaves; if none have the natural entitlement to rule over others, then we all stand equal in our moral status as free. Although there are other traditions (the republican understanding of liberty is not so centrally committed to equality) as well as considerable work within the liberal tradition on possible tensions between freedom and equality, it’s useful to start by remembering their connections.

But each of these two rapid social changes has also raised questions about whether the new norm in favor of equality will undermine liberty. I think these are sometimes fanciful, sometimes offered in bad faith, and often overblown– but not always. There are, at least, real moments of excess, real events that prompt the worries. Moments of rapid norm shift can be moments when pendulums swing too far before returning to center. Those of us who are happy about these two shifts in the direction of equal freedom should, in the same moment, emphasize that the value is equal freedom

Notwithstanding the paranoid fantasies of some religious conservatives, no church or clergy in the United States will be compelled to perform same-sex marriages, any more than they are compelled to perform remarriages or interreligious marriages. Neither will religious teachings about sexuality and marriage be penalized; Kennedy’s opinion reaffirms this obvious point. Kennedy moreover steps away from his previous tendency to say that opposition to homosexuality is nothing but an irrational animus; that view would tend to get in the way of thinking about the just freedom of members of religious groups that oppose same-sex marriage. But there remain live questions about conscientious exemptions and the religious liberty of associations, institutions, and dissenters. The public equal freedom to marry is fully compatible with the private equal freedom of association and of religious belief and practice, and both are worthy of robust defense. I think that the torrent of abuse against the Indiana pizzeria that (briefly) said it wouldn’t cater a same-sex wedding a few months ago was an aberration, not a sign of a slippery slope. I think that the Solicitor General’s concession that private universities denying married-student housing to same-sex married couples might find their tax-exempt status at risk was a moment of absurd stupidity, not a moment when the curtain slipped and the truth was exposed. I think the federal and state RFRAs do, should, and will continue to provide considerable protection for those who don’t want to be involved in same-sex weddings and for those whose beliefs about marriage are incompatible with same-sex marriage. But those are predictions, not analytical truths, and it’s important to stand up for a pluralistic civil society under a regime of equality before the law.

On symbols that celebrate histories of injustice, I think that there are two relevant distinctions: public-private and use-mention. The public use of the Confederate battle flag, as when it is incorporated into a state flag or flown in honor over public buildings is an illegitimate state endorsement of the history of slavery and postbellum terror and subjugation. It should end, completely. But each of the other three categories– public mention, private use, and private mention– is different. The same flag in a museum, or in pictures in a school’s history textbook, or generally in honest accounts of the past, means something very different from what it means when being flown in honor. The Confederate past should not be shoved down a memory hole and obliterated; it should be remembered and confronted. Doing so allows, indeed may require, to mention the symbol– depicting it in the visual equivalent of quotation marks.

Both private use and private mention are, and should be, protected free speech. Private mention isn’t wrongful at all, and the idea that historical strategy Civil War board games have to be purged of the flag are silly. (Swastikas and hammer-and-sickle symbols are likewise reasonable and appropriate, in games depicting the appropriate wars.) I suspect that the rush to wipe out private-sector mentions is the result of panicked decisionmaking by mid-level PR and marketing managers who’ve misunderstood the push to have Walmart stop supporting the private use of the flag by selling acres of flags, flag t-shirts, flag belt buckles, flag truck decals, and so on. The panic will– and should– pass.

Private use isn’t going to disappear and of course shouldn’t be criminalized. That doesn’t mean other private actors shouldn’t try to shame those who use the symbol (as we should try to shame those who use swastikas and Che t-shirts and so on). Nor does it mean consumers shouldn’t express to private economic actors that they don’t want the use of the symbol facilitated and encouraged and promoted. It’s great news that Walmart and Sears decided– in response to their reading of current consumer sentiment– that they should stop selling flags and flag paraphernalia. Freedom of speech includes the freedom not to endorse speech, and while states should not adopt content-based regulations of private speech or expression, private actors do, and should, all the time.

Again, all of that is fully compatible with affirming the rightful freedom of private persons to fly flags they want, wear clothes they want, and speak words they want. The liberal order is an order of equal freedom, and a rush of good news for equality seems like a good moment to reiterate how important both parts of that value are.

See also: Kenji Yoshino on the way that Kennedy’s opinion brings 14th Amendment jurisprudence on liberty and on equality into a closer harmony.