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Comment by dkersten | Hacker News Reader

Theres a fine line between “being allowed to throw a loud ranting racist out of a pub” because the pub is your business and you should be allowed to choose who to do business with and you don’t like racists... and throwing out a person of a different race because it’s your business and you should be allowed to choose who to do business with and don’t like that race...

That is, we want businesses to have the right to choose who to do business with, unless we disagree with their reasons for not wanting to do business with someone.

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It's not really a fine line. There are specific, protected people-features you can't use to discriminate. Saying stupid shit isn't one of them. Race is.

Those laws don't exist because we don't agree with their reasons. They exist to protect people who have been categorically repressed for hundreds of years.

This brings an interesting workaround to mind.

What if they register their ideology as a religion? Iirc it is a protected class in US so they cannot be banned due to it.

However people getting banned like this rarely are inventive enough to figure out ways to fight back.

>What if they register their ideology as a religion? Iirc it is a protected class in US so they cannot be banned due to it.

The thing about the law is that it doesn't operate like code. You can't just cast<Religion>(ideology) and expect it to work within the framework of law, because the law is (luckily) interpreted by people who expect it to be taken advantage of by the unscrupulous.

Otherwise, literally every corporation would already have registered themselves as a religion just to avoid paying taxes.

What if a law is passed to make political affiliation a protected class?

IANAL, but as I understand it, the typical qualifiers for being a protected class tend to be immutable (sex, race, age, disability, color, creed, national origin, religion, or genetic information, per Wikipedia[0].) Obviously you can change your sex and religion, though, and disability status in some cases, though.

Maybe a case could be made for political affiliation under "creed," since there appears to be no specific legal definition for that[1], although the consensus seems to be centered around religious belief.

In any case, since one can (and many people do) change their political affiliations often, I would expect such a law to meet with some extreme legal challenges at the very least, because it seems like such an obvious attempt to game the system, particularly since "discrimination against a political group" is pretty much the purpose of other political groups.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group

[1]https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/8686/what-is-a-creed...

People can and do change their religion. I am proof of that.

True. I have to admit I'm having a hard time coming up with rationales that include religion and whatever "creed" is that would exclude political affiliation as well.

I personally think there's something fundamentally undemocratic about barring discrimination against political ideology because that comes too close to interfering with freedom of speech or freedom of association or the exercise of politics itself.

What about refusing someone because they voted for the other guy in the last election?

"Right to refuse service to anyone" is a sign that was common once.

This is the opposite of a fine line. One is something you are born with/into. The other is a conscious choice.

> who to do business with and don’t like that race...

Although not the historical reason, a far simpler one is: you can change your mind and ideas but can't change your race.

In addition, it is that behavior and not that belief that gets the racist removed from the premises. You can choose to be quiet about your ideas where they are not welcome, but you can't choose to not be your race where it is not welcome.

Yes, this makes sense.

So if being black was a choice you would be okay with businesses discriminating against black people unless they chose to be a different race?

In this hypothetical universe, is it as easy to change one's race as it is to change one's clothes? If so, it seems no different than "no shirt, no shoes, no service."

But then a world in which race was a choice would be so different from our own that one would wonder whether racial discrimination would even exist, or what "black" would even mean.

If I understand the arguments some folks are putting out these days, race, like gender, is now a social construct and therefore entirely mutable: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/06/16/how-fluid-i...

I am not saying I agree or disagree with it, but perhaps things are not as hypothetical as you believe.

> ...you can change your mind and ideas but can't change your race

So we can ban people for/against atheism because it's an idea one could theoretically change their minds on?

I mean you could make the legitimate argument that Atheism is a religion in itself. That said, your example is lacking and ill-defined in legalese.

You can therefore make the argument that not believing in moon goats is a religion, and therefore everyone follows an almost infinite number of religions through their acts of disbelief.

Atheism is literally the opposite of religion.

In the specific case in question the naughty language occurred off platform. So the "racist" in this analogy did keep their mouth quiet in your pub. But you still kicked them out.

Did you know that the incident in question is about this Sargon fellow attacking white nationalists? So to further kill the analogy, you kicked a fellow out of your pub for saying mean things things against racism while at another pub.

Yes, a society* enforces certain choices, but not every choice. "Everything what is not expressly forbidden is allowed" still applies.

* Yes, "society" here works through state. But without a reasonably wide consensus in the society, a norm cannot be effectively imposed: most people would break it and be sure that everyone around won't mind. (Manufacturing such a consent, if it's not yet there, is another business.)

There isn’t a fine line. One is based on a person’s beliefs. The other is based on a person’s genetics.

This is not a fine line. One is behavior and the other is physical attribute which can not be changed and does not affect anyone else.

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