Similarly, more conservative assimilationists such as Andrew Sullivan and Bruce Bawer insist on strict governmental neutrality toward sexual orientation so that LesBiGays may enjoy equal rights in the public sphere and the liberty of personal choices in the private sphere.¹¹⁷

Sullivan synthesizes this narrower conventionalist position by explaining that:

This politics affirms a simple and limited principle: that all public (as opposed to private) discrimination against homosexuals be ended and that every right and responsibility that heterosexuals enjoy as public citizens be extended to those who grow up and find themselves emotionally different. And that is all.¹¹⁸

Whether liberal or libertarian, then, the conventionalists embrace the Madisonian worldview of a civic republican democracy, espouse the normative objective of incorporating LesBiGays into the existing social order, and endorse an approach of formal equality that adopts the American White heterosexual as the baseline for comparison.

In contrast, the queerfolk scholars hold that liberty and equality for LesBiGays will derive only from "anti-subordinationist" struggles in politics and law. Distrusting the conventional faiths of liberal legal theory and assimilationist politics, and emerging from the contemporary tenets of critical race theory, postmodernism, and queer theory, the queerfolk mount an intersectional critique against sociopolitical oppression of all minorities (whether based on race, gender, class, or sexuality). Led by such legal scholars as Frank Valdes and Urvashi Vaid,¹¹⁹ they advocate a paradigm shift in the LesBiGay rights movement. They seek a turning away from civil rights legislation and litigation and a turning toward coalition-oriented and progressive cultural transformation. Concisely describing the queerfolk's modus operandi, Vaid writes:

The paradigm shift liberation requires is from the political to the cultural. Rather than rejecting the ghetto, our subculture, or queer forms of expression, thought, and art as byproducts of our victimization, we should see them as keys to our freedom. These queer cultural tributaries embody the threat we pose to the heterosexual order.¹²⁰