1A protects you from the government. It has no relevance to free speech among persons and corporations.
1A does not give you protection from religious discrimination among persons and corporations.
It is the Civil Rights Act that does.
Clearly at some point someone said "freedom of religion should mean protection from persons and corporations", why can't we say the same about speech?
We can. We just haven't yet, and it is not clear that it would result in a world that most Americans would prefer to the one we live in. And like religion it would be subject to lots of tension and litigation about the speech of the corporation's owner vs. the speech of the corporation's customer.
A salesperson should be able to be fired for shit-talking their own product. A customer service representative should be able to be fired for treating a customer inappropriately. The editor of a magazine should be allowed to edit contributors' articles. Putting speech on the same level as a protected class is ridiculous.
But can definitely fire him for anything he does, right? Like having a pride flag on his backpack? Or committing the speech act of saying "I'm gay"?
Someone mentioning they’re gay after being asked if they have a wife would be a very different situation from someone who, for instance, is engaging people in inappropriate and unwanted discussions of sexuality.
The law is quite simple: was the person fired because of their membership in a protected class?
I mean, what other answer is there than what’s implied by that very question: it’s because “legislators haven’t made a law”.
Now you can believe all you want that there’s been a centuries-old conspiracy by legislators to not ever draw up and approve this kind of law. But maybe you should consider that the other things mentioned in the 1st amendment, such as freedom of press, lobbying, and assembly, also aren’t “codified at the same level” as religious protections. And maybe you’ll realize that there are obvious differences in how religion is perceived to be different than the 4 other things protected by the 1A.
Imagine if someone ask you "Why is this Apple red?", and then you responded by saying "Well obviously, it is red, because it is red!"
Would this response be considered by anyone to be anything other than a pretty extreme bad faith response?
I think it is pretty obvious what the other person was asking. And yet, you responded... in the way that you did.
To use your analogy, it'd be as if u/deadmik3 were asking, "Why must apples be called 'apples', when oranges are called 'oranges'?" It's a question that isn't coherent enough for a single answer, as it seems to be based on flawed foundational assumptions on the part of the asker, e.g. "Who says you 'must' call apples 'apples'" and "Do you actually think English people named oranges after the color, 'orange'?"
Here's deadmik3's original question/assertion [0]:
> Why is speech the only part of 1A that gets this treatment? You wouldn't say the same thing about religion
I would've thought u/kube-system's response was clear enough (e.g. it's the Civil Rights Act, not the 1A, that protects religion), but apparently it hasn't been. So I genuinely don't know what deadmik3's issue is. Do they think laws (and/or the process of making them) are merely a "semantic" concept? Do they think that religion and speech, being in the "First" amendment, confers to them a special overriding priority (i.e. in the way that being in Amendments 2-27 do not)? And if so, have they considered that the 1A explicitly mentions 3 other freedoms – press, assembly, and petition/lobbying – that, like speech, do not have the protection for religion?
Without knowing the presumptions behind their confusing question, it's hard to answer or otherwise debate it. I mean, the natural rebuttal would be to point out that the CRA's protections for religion is far from clear cut and indisputable – has deadmik3 never heard of the gay wedding cake case, which after 6 years ended in a narrowly defined Supreme Court decision? [1] – which means that similar protections for free speech would be even more contentious and logistically complicated, which is likely a key factor why that legislation doesn't exist/has never passed.
But why get into that if someone believes lawmaking is a semantic designation, rather than an actual process that requires considering how a law (and its enforcement) will actually operate in reality?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24570504
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
The semantics, in this case, is when someone is trying to ask "why have lawmakers not done X yet?"
And then the response to this question is "its not the law!"
The original question was quite clearly asking for a justification or reason as for why lawmakers have not done something.
And then the semantic response, that ignored the very obvious question, was to say "this is what the law is!".
If a platform wants the liability protections for being a platform, then we can force them to not act like a publisher, or we can take away those platform protections.