"Shouldn't a company, regardless of the service they provide, be free to establish their own conditions under which they will act or not act?"
like a restaurant in south refusing to serve blacks? with restaurant you have at least some options, but with businesses with monopoly finding an alternative is very hard or expensive.
Which would be illegal as race is a legally protected status.
That seems like a grey area but it's treading pretty close to discrimination in my mind.
Then again, should Google be forced to put adsense ads on a porn site? Really murky territory.
Nope. As I understand it, sexual orientation is not officially a protected class[0]. Seems like it should be, but it isn't.
It is not protected under federal public accommodation law like race is.
Gender identity and sexual orientation are each protected under minority of state laws (overlapping but not identical minorities, IIRC.)
> That seems like a grey area but it's treading pretty close to discrimination in my mind.
It's absolutely discrimination. The question is whether it is or should be illegal discrimination.
Legislation to make it illegal was an act of society deciding that an otherwise-legal business decision was so unpalatable it must be prevented. -- That's what makes it such a good hypothetical. You can ask yourself "if such business decisions were legal, should they be prevented or discouraged? And what mechanisms would be appropriate?"
So I don't understand your point. Yes, it's illegal now.
Are you arguing for companies to always operate as they see fit, as long as it's legal, and regardless of moral opinions of anyone other than themselves?
Are you arguing that there shouldn't be any moral-based laws to stop discrimination like this one?
Are you making a point that companies should be stopped from making immoral decisions with the force of law beyond the current limitations?
Are you making a point that the current set of groups legislation gives legal protection perfectly overlaps with the set of groups that that morally should have protection from otherwise-legal business decisions?
Are you simply being a pedant about the current boundaries of law without meaningful contribution to clean up the hypothetical or clarify the questions raised by the conversation at hand?
In practice: I'd take the bet that a white person of Muslim faith could get around a "no Muslims" rule most of the time. "No Muslims", then, can be a proxy for "no middle-Eastern looking folks".
Other laws, like the ADA and FHA, have expanded on this, and individual states have broader protections. Look at the case of Sweet Cakes by Melissa in Oregon, which was fined for refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex couple.
For emergency care, look up the EMTLA. There are many other regulations centered on discrimination and health care, that's just one of them.
Thats a lot different than 'allow everything with no judgement'
If the service is important enough that it has to be mandated in some cases then why shouldn't it be mandated in all cases? If it isn't that important, why should it be mandated in any case?
It's not absurd that an essential civil service -- payment processing -- should be regulated to uphold our collective standards of freedom, and not use their privileged position to impose their private moral standards on society.
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -John Gilmore
Banks: Whatever legal business you turn away, you basically give away to crypto; and once it's there, it will never come back. Decide carefully.
People need to realize that risk is itself a market. If everyone avoids risk (such as banks avoiding doing business with any remotely-risky business, such as legal marijuana sales), the first person (or entity) who doesn't shy away from risk stands to gain a lot more than if people were generally less fearful of risk. So cryptocurrencies, being completely fearless, will always fill the financial spaces that have been left vacant by more fearful living entities. ;)
Perhaps there is even an entity that has realized this and is working to instill fear in the hearts of everyone in order to reap greater rewards from their own risk-taking. But I'm off into tinfoil-hat territory, there.
Paypal holds all the data and when they ban you for whatever reason, they keep it, so even if there is another option, once you commit to Paypal, you are committed.
Cloudflare didn't kick Daily Stormer off until DS started publicly claiming that the reason CF was continuing to serve them was that CF secretly agreed with DS's politics [0]. That was a lie and might even be cause for a libel suit.
The analogy would be if the gay couple secured the agreement of the baker to bake them a wedding cake, then started announcing publicly that the reason the baker was doing that was because the baker was secretly gay. I don't think anyone would have a problem, at that point, with the baker telling them to take their business elsewhere.
Being a member of an unpopular group doesn't give you carte blanche to abuse the goodwill of the private businesses that would otherwise be required to serve you.
The actions of GoDaddy and Google in this case are less defensible, and indeed, I don't defend them. (If I understand correctly, GoDaddy kicked DS off their DNS service, so they went to Google, who not only refused to serve their domain but put it on hold, so they can't even use it elsewhere. I'm not aware that DS provoked either company they way they did Cloudflare.)
[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
I'm not saying CF /should/ be obligated to provide the service to everyone.
I'm just saying if they were, then speculation about any implied agreement would go away.
Assuming someone will ask, "Why do we talk about what is (law) rather than what could be (ideals)", you're perfectly fine to hold the ideal that political beliefs should not be discriminated against. But you probably aren't happy with just believing in an ideal, and so you want to know why political belief is not a legally protected class like age, religion, sex, race, etc. This means we have to include real world considerations, including legal history/precedent and the realistic implementation of law, when arguing whether political beliefs should get legal protections.
To make a quick initial argument, I think political belief is hard to protect because it is nearly indistinguishable from any kind of belief. At that point, how sensical is a legal system after it becomes impossible to discriminate on any kind of assertive opinion?
The line is already difficult and blurred with religion (which is protected because of centuries of prior belief and political situations), as we see in the case of a religious baker refusing to bake for gay customers. I'm not saying there's an easy or happy answer to this and similar disputes, just that protection of political beliefs would make things even worse without much benefit.
The other thing to consider is that as someone who has political beliefs and wants to assert them, you have the entire U.S. political system to participate and effect the change you want. But being political is not necessary when following a religion, and in some religions, it's outright antithetical. These folks would have little recourse to petition politicians and lawmakers.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/07/26/ada.history/index.html
The outlawing of discrimination against disabilities is, IMO, very humane, and it's hard to imagine something like it being sponsored by a very liberal Senator and signed by a Republican president. That said, the law has required significant costs from society. California, which I believe has stronger disability laws, still faces big debate about the cost to businesses:
http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert...
As accepted as ADA is by the status quo, that doesn't mean that the definition of disabled, or of the costs needed to fulfill the law, are easily understood. But I do think its issues and conflicts are relatively simple compared to a law that outlawed discrimination against political beliefs.
How would that even work without getting quickly entangled with the First Amendment? Or even in implemented in everyday life. Business owners have no right whatsoever to fire someone for expressing beliefs that run profoundly counter to the business? Or to kick out a trolling customer?
You tell me, you're the one claiming it's unacceptable to refuse to do business with certain kinds of people.
> Business owners have no right whatsoever to fire someone for expressing beliefs that run profoundly counter to the business?
You mean like a Christian business being unable to refuse service to people whose activities run counter to the tenets of Christianity?
Remember, I'm not the one claiming forcing people to do business against their will is acceptable.
If you steal from PayPal we don't say "they're a private company, they knew the risks" do we?