  Recent attempts to resolve the ambiguity in the loop quantum gravity
description of the quantization of area has led to the idea that j=1 edges of
spin-networks dominate in their contribution to black hole areas as opposed to
j=1/2 which would naively be expected. This suggests that the true gauge group
involved might be SO(3) rather than SU(2). We argue that the idea that a
version of the Pauli principle is present in loop quantum gravity allows one to
maintain SU(2) as the gauge group while still naturally achieving the desired
suppression of spin-1/2 punctures. Such an idea can be motivated by arguments
from geometric quantization even though the SU(2) under consideration does not
have the geometrical interpretation of rotations in 3-dimensional space, and
its representation labels do not correspond to physical angular momenta. In
this picture, it is natural that macroscopic areas come almost entirely from
j=1 punctures rather than j=1/2 punctures, and this is for much the same reason
that photons lead to macroscopic classically observable fields while electrons
do not.
