OK, a lot of thoughts about this recent discourse, but let’s start with the simple stuff:

You can create a system in which people are constrained.  You can also create a system in which people have freedom of choice.  You cannot create a system in which people have freedom of choice, but other people don’t judge them for the choices they make.  That doesn’t work even in theory.  Humans react to the social data with which they are presented, and draw conclusions, and update.  That is precisely the thing for which humans are evolved. 

(If people are systematically drawing the wrong conclusions from given choices, because there’s a widespread belief in bad data, you can of course try to correct that.  That does happen.  More commonly, though, the conclusions are accurate at least heuristically, and the complainers just don’t want those thoughts to be thought regardless.) 

One of the major functions of a constraining default norm is that it allows people to engage in a certain behavior without having other people read too much into it.  If the thing you’re doing is mandatory, the fact that you’re doing it doesn’t carry very much data about you.  This is most useful when there’s a thing that a lot of people really want to do, but that is most desired by people who are Bad in some way, such that it’s very easy to feel pressure to show that you’re not Bad by eschewing it.