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Comment by cvwright | Hacker News Reader

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."

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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.

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