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I think this is just wrong? Sodomy laws have certainly existed to outlaw things happening in private, for example. I'm pretty sure there have been banned books that it's not legal to own private copies of. To the extent that restrictions on pornography exist they've applied to private spaces. Etc.
At any rate: Yes, the public/private distinction is relevant, asking for things to be kept out of public spaces is being less of a utility monster than asking for them to be eradicated entirely. Although the modern world has complicated that distinction profoundly; are social media sites public or private? If you do something in a private space that gets recorded and then broadcast in public (maybe by an enemy), was the thing itself ok? Is Netflix or Cartoon Network 'public'? There's a lot of room to stretch the definition of 'in public' into every corner of our private lives, which seems to be the tact used whenever you allow 'disgust' as a policy-relevant factor for people to manipulate.
But you're also ignoring one of my central points here:
You're still reifying 'disgusting things' as if that were an ontologically basic category, rather than a subjective individual judgement which is contingent on culture and upbringing and which people can train themselves into or out of or just lie about.
If you think being gay is a sin and should be illegal, I can point at separation of church and state and tell you to screw off. If you say that gay people are disgusting and you shouldn't be forced to see them holding hands in public, suddenly you've appropriated the power to take away their rights to act normally and be regular people across huge swaths of daily life, plus all the other knock-on effects of making things invisible and hidden.
And again, the point is that 'disgust at seeing gay people holding hands' is not a universal or primitive qualia the way 'pain at being slapped' is. You can train yourself into or out of it, culturally if not individually, which means that allowing it to be a factor in forming policy turns it into a weapon that you're incentivized to encourage.
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