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Comment by cvwright | Hacker News Reader

This is a fascinating example, particularly in comparison to the "wedding cake" cases from a couple of years ago.

The question of trading off between the customer's speech and the service provider's freedom seems to be nearly the same in both cases.

But the people following along at home have almost all traded sides! Those who were for the customer before are now cheering for the provider. Those who supported the old provider are now supporting the new customer. And they're using many of the same arguments to do it.

People are weird.

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Not at all.

One important difference here is that people are free to discriminate on almost any grounds except a narrow set that have proven to be irrational and historically devastating. Race, gender, religion, and a few other things depending on jurisdiction.

The same rules apply to YouTube. If they had been arbitrarily banning the accounts of black people, they would have lost.

Ok, I did some digging.

The wedding cake case in Oregon was much closer to what you describe.

The one in Colorado was more like the Youtube case. He offered to sell them a cake off the shelf, but refused to create a custom cake for something he didn't support.

Your theory is that, say, a baker not making a cake because he's opposed to interracial marriage is basically indistinguishable from YouTube deciding not to run ads against some of PragerU's videos?

You're making a moral case that one of these examples should be treated differently from the other because of the morality of their opinions.

It's not against the law to be a bad person. In fact, there's a famous quote from H.L. Mencken that "The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels."

The legal question is whether or not you can be required to create, perform, or publish something against your will. So in that narrow sense, yes the two cases are isomorphic.

If you start trying to create a legal framework that grants rights based on who's a good person and who isn't, well... Then you have a long road in front of you, and as they say, it's "paved with good intentions."

That is not in fact what I'm doing. Refusing to serve, say, black people is illegal because of the pernicious societal harm caused by discrimination. A web site refusing to run ads against some corporation's videos does not have that track record of harm.

> Refusing to serve, say, black people is illegal because of the pernicious societal harm caused by discrimination.

That is true, but that's not what the Colorado guy was doing. (In the Oregon case, you're right, it's much more similar.)

The Colorado guy was closer to somebody who refuses to make a cake for MLK Day. Not making a cake to celebrate Martin Luther King does make you a pretty crappy person, but it's not quite the same thing as excluding a customer based on their race.

I don't think that hair can be effectively split. By your logic there's all sorts of obviously anti-black stuff he can do on the nominal grounds of message. Refuse to make a cake bearing a name he sees as black. Refuse to make a cake celebrating the birthday of a black person.

Similarly, a print shop could by that theory refuse to reproduce the resume of a black person on the grounds that they think black employment is against their religion. There's extensive (white) theological history supporting that position.

Of course, exactly none of this is the same thing as YouTube deciding not to run ads on some corporation's videos.

> It's not against the law to be a bad person. In fact, there's a famous quote from H.L. Mencken that "The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels."

> If you start trying to create a legal framework that grants rights based on who's a good person and who isn't, well... Then you have a long road in front of you, and as they say, it's "paved with good intentions."

This is the absolute crux of the matter, and something that the current crop of puritans ignore.

I don't see how this case and the wedding cake case are even remotely similar beyond the fact that both of the defendants are businesses.

These cases are not even remotely the same.

In the case of the bakers refusing to bake a wedding cake for a lesbian couple (I followed this case closely as I lived in Oregon at the time), the cake shop owners refused to bake the cake on the grounds that they said specifically they refused to bake the cake because the couple was gay. The bakers also went the additional step of doxxing this customer for which they paid a hefty fine.

Also in Oregon, gay people are a protected class of citizen by the State.

The problem with that comparison is that we eat cakes. I think a better example would be that of the long-lamented "Fairness Doctrine". The explosion of right-wing AM radio would never have occurred without Reagan's repeal of that FCC policy in 1987. So naturally conservatives think the Fairness Doctrine was terrible. Imagine, having to play the same number of liberal radio programs as conservative radio programs on your AM station! Online, it's different, for reasons. Of course, no one remembers what happened in the 1980s, although Limbaugh is still around.

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