For the same reason is not ok for a public business to not make cakes for gay couples, we should not allow public businesses to pick and choose who is allowed to be part of the economy. If you want to argue against that, that is fine, but you have to accept it when people with the completely opposite set of morals start discriminating against _you_

edit: In case it wasn't clear, I am not a fan of Nazis, but I don't want to even set up the opportunity for businesses to have the power to just exclude me from normal day to day activity just because the CEO has decided he doesn't like whatever group I am in

On the other hand, allowing neo-nazis to go unhindered may quite reasonably result in people's deaths, so.

I'd suggest that your customers would have a right to boycott you, protest you, and attempt to socially shame you if you did either of those things.

I don't know about that, but it is illegal to boycott Israel.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

We'll the Nazis killed millions of people and storm trooper not only celebrates that but also endorsed Killing innocent civilians in a rally.

If you hosting someone's site is going to result in a message of so much hate that it results in innocent deaths then yes, THE LINE IS CROSSED.

The answer is: no, the baker cannot discriminate against pro-choice customers or else they'll be shutdown by the mob and cease being a baker.

I think GP's point was that there's a nasty double standard as to whose conscience can be exercised and whose cannot.

I think the gracious thing for you to do now would be to acknowledge that that double-standard exists AND confirm that you're fine with that double standard in some cases.

Cloudflare will probably endure social consequences for its actions - mostly inflicted upon them by social libertarians who believe they made this decision arbitrarily. Some of the social repercussions may be justified. But that doesn't mean their decision was unlawful, just frowned upon by certain quarters.

It always comes down to a war of values. This discussion is just a proxy for the larger discussion, which concerns which values are right and which are wrong. And there is, most of us would say, a real, universal answer there. We might not know what it is, but we believe there is one. Or else all of this hand-wringing is just arbitrary, and it comes down to who has more power.

And based on events in Charlottesville, white supremacy is inherently a violent movement & don't need any excuses to engage in violence. If they say they engage in violence because media & internet companies shut them out, I'm not sure I buy that excuse.

They've been marching for years without violence.

Antifa, on the other hand...when have they ever protested without violence?

And then, when they felt they had a government sympathetic to their aims, they stopped being non-violent, and stopped covering their faces to hide their identities. And someone died being run over with a car, many people were brutally beaten (this has been captured on videotape), and two cops died responding to the chaos they caused.

I don't know about the history of "Antifa" violence but I do know what I can see with my own eyes, which is that Nazis are violent. Their expressed philosophy of government is of white nationalism, of removing all non-whites from the nation (whether through deportation or genocide). It is a proposal of mass violence. It is a movement of violence.

You're trying very hard to make a connection there.

Antifa has been instigating full on riots since the election. We're talking beating people unconscious (captured on video), torching buildings (captured on video), looting businesses (captured on video), destroying property (captured on video), and blocking traffic (captured on video), all without significant media coverage (despite the video footage). This can mostly be attributed to the general populace not being familiar with Antifa or its downright violent tactics/rioting.

It's a miracle Antifa hasn't managed to kill anybody yet. It is the only reason they haven't received significant media coverage; had the nut in the car not driven through a crowd, this whole mess would have flown under the radar, just like every political riot before this.

I'd also like to add that Trump is "sympathetic" to neo-Nazis in the same way Bernie Sanders is; isolationism is popular among white nationalists and supremacists. Adolf Hitler supported gun control, strict conservation efforts, and discouraged smoking; is everybody who supports these ideas a Nazi?

Here are the concrete facts: The President failed to condemn open, white supremacists with designs on ethnic cleansing as the chief instigators of this violence. Nazis feel like they have an ally (Not wrongly) in the White House, and are emboldened. They have actually acted violently. Nazism is a violent ideology. These are the prevailing winds. I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole of false equivalency with you.

The president did condemn open white supremacy, and did associate them with the violence, albeit not as strongly as it seems you would prefer, and not as the sole instigators (which they weren't).

Modern Antifa is also a (generally) violent group rooted in extreme socialist/communist politics, with the general overreaching idea of the violent overthrow of anybody they consider to be a "fascist." They have "actually acted violently," and have done so with much greater frequency and magnitude than any far-right group has in the last twelve months.

This isn't a false equivalency as much as it is an inconvenient one for leftist/progressive politics.

This is both a segue and something tightly related; do you think the genocide of white males is hypothetically possible, and do you have an opinion on the relation between the Armenian genocide and the modern-day "alt-right" notion of "diversity = white genocide" in relation to (re/dis)placement migration as promoted by the European Union, Sweden, Canada, Germany and France?

(I just noticed the combination of overwhelmingly (Islamic?) male illegal migrants and "diversity" as in the promotion of ethnic minorities and non-males, I think that might result in some interesting conflicts re: normal non-Western attitudes regarding women, but perhaps there is no conflict because of some dynamic I'm underestimating or overlooking?)

I think a lot of people aren't aware; the media hasn't been reporting it much. Someone who wants the full picture of what happened in Charlottesville should learn more about their history of violence, everywhere from Berkeley to Hamburg.

They've been violent against people ranging from neo-Nazis to college speakers to Trump supporters to police officers to the G20.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/the-ris...

Yes, a "double-standard" exists in that people think that some forms of discrimination are reprehensible and others aren't. I think it's entirely reasonable that people use their freedom of speech and freedom not to interact with people they don't like in any way they see fit - to think otherwise is to deny people some of their core human rights.

At the root of it all, the state is in the position of ensuring a person's livelihood, not me as an individual, not any individual business.

Nazis vs Gay couples are easy, softball examples of "clearly reprehensible" versus otherwise. But if you allow the double standard, you'll find a fairly large grey area. Are meat eaters reprehensible too? The religious? The anti-religious? non-religious pro-lifers (like myself)?

As I said, the answer is simply NO. The mob will try to destroy you if you're on the mob's bad side.

Oh you are a dear for air-quote acknowledging that there is a double standard that you approve of. A CEO can break his company policies and refuse to serve an ugly customer who is engaging in protected speech but that they find morally reprehensible. A baker cannot refuse to serve a protected class that they find morally reprehensible or else suffer government penalties, media firestorms, and a ruined business and reputation.

Four legs good, two legs bad, am I right?

This thread is so full of false analogies, it's unbelievable.

Should any business be obliged by law to make business with and thereby indirectly support advocates of genocide and racism? Should any business be forced to make business with Nazis, Red Khmer, Stalinists, etc.? If your answer is Yes, then I have bad news for you. No need to spell it out, though, as it's obvious...

At what point in this process do you think it would be been morally appropriate for you to cancel your service to this group?

Let say a local youth group submits a proposal to have their weekly meetups in your venue. They then begin to shoplift. What is the rational behavior to address this issue?

I would start by calling the police and report the crime. I could then start denying service to them (which casinos are known to do). But if I start to do general statements about any people which share identity, belief, political membership, or sexual orientation with the local youth group then I am likely stepping a bit to far into the realm of discrimination.

In a perfect world I think Cloudflare should have filed a police complaint in regard to the daily stormer and then canceled the account. Such decision would have nothing to do with regulating content, censorship, vigilante justice, or freedom of speech. It would just be a simple matter of a customer not obeying the law.

So a bakery making generic wedding cakes must provide them for everyone, and we as society are crystal clear that this does not imply the baker supports interracial marriage. However, a bakery providing custom cakes based on the couple cannot be compelled to write "Arranged marriage between children is beautiful" on a cake.

A web host is required to sell you webspace regardless of your content, unless it is actually illegal or contrary to technical and ideologically neutral terms of service. But a web design firm may decline to design a page for you based on its content.

I think this is a really good principle, and a great way to preserve both free speech and freedom of conscience.

Well, welcome to the club! Other noteable groups objecting to their principles being regulated by a government office include Masterpiece Cakeshop of Lakewood, CO, and Memories Pizza of Walker, IN. (For the moment, disregard the likes of Hobby Lobby and Little Sisters of the Poor, as their matters of principle-regulation are less directly relevant.)

I figure there are three-ish main options.

1. People are consistently required to suppress their principles, and do business with groups like the Daily Stormer.

2. People are consistently allowed to exercise their principles, and refuse service to gay weddings.

3. A disaster area of conflicting regulations both for and against the right of various groups to be served by various businesses, conforming to no consistent set of principles but rather to whatever is politically popular and expedient today, and hypocritical to the core.

My money's on 3.

(There's a theoretical possibility they'll actually nail down specific principles and not make it a total mess, but I don't think it's plausible.)

Your notable groups are not required or regulated in any way that would require them to print a swastika on a cake or a Hitler face on their pizza if the customer ask so. They are, however, required to serve queer and non-queer people of all skin tones. There is indeed a difference between these kinds of discrimination.

The rule is more like "don't randomly screw people". Ok, we've decided to screw this Nazi website. Hmm, is that a case of randomly screwing people? Nope. OK, move along.

Religious beliefs seem to fall squarely in the latter category (at least to the extent that political views do). Are you really comfortable with people discriminating on that basis?

Basically: If your view demands anything of me or any other person I might know other than pure tolerance of your view, I can choose to discriminate against you. If your view only demands tolerance and only makes prescriptions for you, I can't. Obviously, the real world is a bit more messy since even a political moderate view that demands higher taxes to feed the poor infringes on my freedom to earn money - so the question where to draw that line is a matter of open debate.

Political views are sometimes similar in character to religious views, such that expressing contrary opinions results in shunning and being ostracized by one's family and community.

It's one of the major reasons why free and fair elections have to use secret ballots, aside from vote-buying. Around here, it's risky to even participate in partisan primary elections, because employers can look up your name in the voting records and determine which party's ballot you used, then engage in party-based discrimination at work that ranges from subtle to blatantly overt.

While this area seems to have more than its fair share of petty and bigoted persons, it can basically happen anywhere that requires a declaration of party affiliation during the primary.

My own spouse has turned a bit more left over the years, even as my siblings-in-law have gone more to the right. It has resulted in some rancor, as those four gratuitously post replies on Facebook for each other's posts and summarily delete replies by my spouse. They're really being a bunch of a-holes.

If you don't conform to the views of your local community, you're going to have a hard time. And the more homogenous it is, the more you can be punished for your non-conformity.

The principle that applies is a basic Enlightenment one: everyone has the right to speak. You don't have to agree. You can not visit their shop. You can protest outside their shop. But you don't get to barricade their shop and cut its wires.