Hacker News Reader

Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

Private people and organizations are well within their rights to set their own rules.

Aren't we tired of saying this by now? That's fine, everyone can express her own views on Facebook, unless one is a Kurd who would like to say something about Kemal Atatürk? Should the Kurds have to create their own Facebook? Who's next, Trump voters? Do we really want them to sink further into their filter bubble?

At some point a service offered to the public must actually serve the public. We don't allow bakeries to choose which weddings they will cater. If you'll bake a wedding cake for $200, then you have to get baking, even if the happy couple with $200 are two dudes or whatever.

View on HN

We don't allow bakeries to choose which weddings they will cater

I think it's incredibly entitled to want the government to punish private businesses for refusing to do a job. Not everyone has to agree with your ideas or provide you a service. Getting the state involved to literally force a small business to make a cake is an insane, authoritarian over-reaction. The fact that it seems OK to you because you have no problem with gay marriage (neither do I, btw) is really besides the point.

By all means - boycott the bakery. Call them stupid for the bad PR and lack of work they'll get for not making the cake. But coercing them under the threat of force to do a job they don't want to do? Absolutely insane, and I can't agree to it.

I sympathize with that point of view, and I think e.g. discriminatory preachers and wedding photographers are protected by the 1st Amendment (and rightly so). However I find myself fairly indifferent on the topic of wedding cakes (and gay marriage, for that matter). Baking a cake is not a religious act; it is a mundane service provided in exchange for payment. No one has objected to baking e.g. Super Bowl party cakes, even though those don't honor St. Paul the Judgmental Ass either. Lots of other mundane service providers, like mechanics, taxi drivers, grocers, etc. might like to reject the custom of those of particular races or religions, but we have laws against that too. There are well-known reasons for those laws; we don't live in an ahistorical libertopia.

Still, yours is an salutary consistency. My original statement wasn't directed at you but rather at the sort of SV person who "boycotts" Indiana and North Carolina but still talks about the "rights" of a social media service.

I agree with you. I don't know why or how it came to be that diversity is the greatest virtue in Western society and every White Western country is being forced to take in so many that Whites will be a minority. Meanwhile an educated Chinese or Japanese citizen has an incredibly difficult challenge in legally migrating to America or Western Europe. What the fuck is going on here? I don't like bigotry, but this just doesn't seem right.

When you criminalize a certain pattern of thought, it seems that its inverse will eventually get taken to the most extreme position.

That does appear to be the case

Sorry, what? I was talking about baking cakes. Did you mean to reply to someone else?

You don't see the connection? You were really talking about government mandates that: 'if you provide a service or product, you must perform the same service for everyone,' which typically fall under Equal Opportunity and Fair Housing laws(I believe?). I don't see the point in you being disingenuous here? Anyways, those laws protect diversity. Diversity is protected more than free speech. I don't know if that's the right priority. I just hold an opinion that fundamental human rights and liberties should be the primary role of government's use of their monopoly on violence.

>At some point a service offered to the public must actually serve the public. We don't allow bakeries to choose which weddings they will cater. If you'll bake a wedding cake for $200, then you have to get baking, even if the happy couple with $200 are two dudes or whatever.

Excellent point. It is very well worth noting that pragmatically speaking, current law treats diversity > free speech, as is illustrated in your example.

Jessaustin that's a well written expression of that idea, thank you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com