"The privacy thing" ... ???
I hate to sound like a broken record (although I see that I'm going to, because there's another thread where the same argument needs making at even greater length), but we have a problem of false equivalence here -- at least we do if you are still a defender of the basic principles and structures of democracy.
Freedom of conscience, meaning autonomy over your own mind and your person (with one significant exception), is the most fundamental structural value of democracy, any kind of democracy. There is a reason it is the first clause of substance in every Bill or Charter or Declaration of any democracy deserving of the name, and in many it applies uniquely to all human beans, not just citizens. As I said in a similar conversation last week, I will not die for your right to drive a car (I think it was municipal zoning regulations then), but I will die for your freedom of conscience.
I think it is a serious error for socialists to fall for simplistic oppositions of the individual to the collectivity, given the horrendous uses to which some right-wing populist notions of the collectivity have been put. There is nothing un-socialist about valuing the dignity of every living human bean, and that dignity is always founded on respect for the autonomy of the individual over her own mind and her own body (with that one exception).
Referenda have their place in democracies, but not at this level. Democracy does not mean just voting, and it doesn't mean the tyranny of any majority. Section 2 of the Charter is not up for a vote, eh? Ask Rousseau.
*The one exception: Any society has the right to restrain your person -- by arrest or imprisonment -- if you are fairly judged to be dangerous to others. No society ever has the right to muck about in your mind, not ever.
Of course these are all ideals. But if we don't defend them and teach them, who will?