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Is this a rhetorical question? Yes, it is the world I want to live in. If the business operates within the context of healthy competition, then while they are free to refuse service, others are equally free to boycott it. This democratizes social norms. I don't want to force gun shops to sell to people they have a bad feeling about (say, because they have a racist tattoo), and I don't want a law that attempts to distinguish between "good" iffy feelings and "bad" ones.

If on the other hand the company is a monopoly and no reasonable alternatives are available, then it is de-facto infrastructure and should be more stringently regulated for impartiality, as is the government (and frankly such companies are a problem anyway, and should possibly be adopted by the government when they reach that size). The DMV isn't allowed to turn you away for a swastika tattoo, and neither should the electric company. But a baker? Absolutely.

The problem with this seemingly simple philosophy is that it results in minorities being ostracised. "Democratising social norms" turns into "Outlawing anything the majority won't tolerate". Suddenly you have towns where black people can't live, because no-one will do business with them. Sure, "healthy competition" should solve this problem - there's money to be made! But people are not perfectly economically rational. We are tribal creatures of prejudice, predisposed to subconsciously reject and suspect anything or anyone as "different".

Laws are often made to protect minorities, because history shows us time and time again that an unchecked majority of people can be real dicks.

> Laws are often made to protect minorities, because history shows us time and time again that an unchecked majority of people can be real dicks.

Under democracy, a majority of people can decide what laws there are, and inflict their dickishness as they wish. Laws are often made to oppress minorities. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws

See also part I of this essay: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/21/current-affairs-some-p...

While there are obvious exceptions, much of the time the majority has some empathy with traditionally oppressed minorities and votes for politicians who make laws to protect them.

> Under democracy, a majority of people can decide what laws there are

Also worth pointing out that under most democracies, this isn't true. The people decide which people should decide what laws there should be. It's an important difference.

How far do you want to go? Should a company be forced to offer products to minorities? Say a comb maker who creates combs for the straight hair market should they be forced to offer hair picks? Not doing so leaves them ostracised.

In France it is straight illegal to refuse to sell to a customer without a legitimate reason. Whether a reason is legitimate is up to court interpretation but not liking the skin color or sexual orientation would not qualify. A racist tattoo at a shoot range would probably.

And it doesn't cause any trouble. B2B is not concerned obviously.

As far as possible.

Of course companies have to offer products to minorities, have you ever seen parking spots for handicapped people in the mall?

Of course a restaurant has to ask you if you have some intolerance before serving you food that could contain allergens.

USA Better start to learn that 300 millions people don't make the entire world.

> This sounds really good until someone refuses to bake a wedding cake for a couple because they're gay. The supreme court ruled in favor of the baker. You're advocating for a world where that's ok.

That's not what the Supreme Court ruled. They ruled that the CO commissioners who decided against the baker in the first place were being blatantly flippant about the baker's religious beliefs. They should have at least considered those beliefs. They explicitly did not rule that the baker's religious beliefs were enough on their own to prevent the sale.

https://www.scotusblog.com/2018/06/opinion-analysis-court-ru...

Suppose the custom cake bakery owner is black, and a customer asks for a cake with a confederate flag design? There's nothing illegal about the confederate flag, so the baker should be compelled to bake it, right? There isn't even a basis for refusal based on religious grounds.

I would want the black baker owner to be able to not only refuse to bake the cake, but to also tell the customer to take a hike and never return.

> so the baker should be compelled to bake it, right? There isn't even a basis for refusal based on religious grounds.

No. Because "supports the confederacy" isn't a protected class.

As far as US law goes, you can generally refuse a service to anyone for any reason, unless that reason is related to a protected class to which the person belongs, unless you have some other exception (almost always religious) for not doing the thing.

As you say protected class is a very US specific, but even there it actually depend on the state as they can and in some places has extended it. Protected class under federal law is one list and protected class under state law is an other.

Protected class does also not mean that everyone else if a free target for discrimination, and for international companies there is the European Convention on Human Rights. Refusing service based on politics require the company to do a quite complicated dance around a long list of laws and I doubt any company lawyer would be very happy to give a green light for it.

Suppose the custom cake bakery owner is black, and a customer asks for a cake with a confederate flag design?

This is a fun game! Suppose the baker is Muslim and you ask for a cake with a cartoon of The Prophet? Wouldn’t that make you the bigot?

My point is you can contrive any example here to get the conclusion you want.

Same sex marriage wasn't even recognized in Colorado at the time. Your ire would be better directed elsewhere, such as the state where the action they wanted to celebrate wasn't legal. Especially a state where you can penalize someone for not baking a cake for an event that isn't legal in the first place.

The whole case was a ridiculous hit job.

People buy wedding cakes for handfastings, renewals of wedding vows, and many other kinds of ceremonies somewhat like a wedding but not legally a wedding, such as the sham weddings that people hold after being married by a justice of the peace at a courthouse. People even buy them to use on stage during theater productions.

That's not actually at issue in the Colorado case. "I will not sell you that cake because you're gay" is the issue, not the type of cake.

> "I will not sell you that cake because you're gay" is the issue, not the type of cake.

This contradicts everything I've read about the case. The baker disagreed with gay marriage, not being gay. To suggest that the baker wouldn't have sold any cake to a gay customer is ridiculous.

I think these bakers suck, but I do agree with the Supreme Court. A private business should be allowed to refuse to serve customers for whatever reason they choose.

The only exception should be legal monopolies; they shouldn't be allowed to discriminate, because there are otherwise no other options.

> I think these bakers suck, but I do agree with the Supreme Court. A private business should be allowed to refuse to serve customers for whatever reason they choose.

This was not the conclusion of the SCOTUS case.

It pushed the case back down to the State on procedural consideration.

We also have a bunch of reasons (protected classes) that a company cannot refuse to do business. Colorado specifically includes sexual orientation in their definition of protected classes.

>We also have a bunch of reasons (protected classes) that a company cannot refuse to do business. Colorado specifically includes sexual orientation in their definition of protected classes.

I don't think this is relevant to this specific case. The baker didn't refuse to do business with the gay couple. He was happy to sell them a generic off-the-shelf wedding cake.

He refused to sell them a personalized cake, which is considered a form of expression. The government cannot compel you to express yourself a certain way if it goes against your religious beliefs.

But that was not determined by this SCOTUS case and remains an open question to the best of my knowledge.

> He was happy to sell them a generic off-the-shelf wedding cake.

If you're talking about the Masterpiece Cakeshop baker, he didn't say that until the lawsuit was in-progress. At the time that the couple went in, he refused to serve them without discussing what they wanted.

> We also have a bunch of reasons (protected classes) that a company cannot refuse to do business. Colorado specifically includes sexual orientation in their definition of protected classes.

I would absolutely support adding sexual orientation to that list in every state, or at the federal level. But if it's not there in the bakers' state, then, legally, they are (unfortunately) in the clear.

Colorado does indeed have anti-discrimination laws to protect gay people which the baker was in clear violation of. The Supreme Court made a narrow ruling on a procedural matter.

> A private business should be allowed to refuse to serve customers for whatever reason they choose.

So you're fine with "whites only" signs in shops?

Hope that doesn't sound too extreme but while I understand where you're coming from I think it's important to acknowledge where the rhetoric about not distinguishing your customers based on their personal characteristics comes from.

"Whites only" signs are illegal discrimination. I suppose I should have said, "for whatever legal reason they choose". If the state wishes to make discrimination based on sexual orientation illegal -- which I would support! -- then obviously things go differently.

There are a couple cases being heard by the Supreme Court right now that are attempting to argue that discrimination against gay and transgender people is inherently discrimination based on sex (which is a protected class everywhere in the US); I'm very interested in how that turns out.

It seems a little circular to say that your argument is based on what is legal, when the discussion is about what should be legal.

Anyways I think your point is mainly that there is a line between what is required of a business and what constitutes a right to self-determination / self-expression. Where to draw that line is certainly not obvious and we understand new things about it as society progresses. So in that sense I do understand your point of view, and I happen to agree that certain decisions regarding what work they take should be allowed by a business, but I hope the point has been made that you have to be careful what you wish for when stating absolutes like "for whatever reason they choose."

For the record, almost of all of the baking cases in the courts, including the famous Colorado baker case, are in states that have anti-discrimination laws for LGBT people. These cases are challenging the laws saying that it's the religious right to discriminate against LGBT people.

> I think these bakers suck, but I do agree with the Supreme Court. A private business should be allowed to refuse to serve customers for whatever reason they choose.

That's not what the Supreme Court found; it has not invalidated public accommodation anti-discrimination law in general, nor even the specific law the State relied on in the case. It did rule that the specific procedural history of the case indicated that State officials acted with specific targeted religious animus in the case, invalidating the state enforcement action even if the law was Constitutional and the enforcement factually warranted under it otherwise.

What about refusing to serve black people ? This was literally the premise of civil rights.

30, if not 3 years ago, this wouldn't even be a question. If somebody argues that the refusal is based on religious grounds, it seems like it would be a relevant test case in US politics.

Refusing to serve black people is illegal discrimination. It sucks that sexual orientation isn't a protected class in all states, but the bakers are legally clear here.

And the “but for” argument should have clearly applied here. They would not be denied a cake but for the gender (protected class) of who they were marrying. This was a clear case of judicial reinterpretation to meet an agenda.

Doesn't Colorado explicitly ban discrimination against gay people?

OK, but are they a private business? Are they a small reservation only shop, preferably not located on commercially zoned land?

Hah, ninja'd. We wrote the same comment, except mine's longer.

That's not what happened, the baker offered to sell them any cake he had. The couple also wanted him to write a message on the cake that was against his religious beliefs.

Ever read ToC on free services? They have the right to terminate the service at any time for any reason. It doesn't matter if you've connected 100s of services to your free Google login, or keep thousands of mails and contacts in your gmail, or made a great business grabing eyes on youtube so that Google can sell ads on your videos and share a bit of profits with you.

For example today we've seen Google terminate a service of distributing an app on AppStore because it disagreed with a developer having a donation link, despite that not being excluded in ToS (or so I heard). And it doesn't really matter, how you company refuses a service. ToS just makes reasons for refusal codified and ToS can change at any time.

This is already a world we live in, SV companies practice this daily, and I doubt tech companies want this to change.

Moral arbiter is society at any rate. Tech workers are part of society, and their companies can't really make rules like you suggested (no service for gays) at scale without getting a major backlash from the public, or internally. Or if they could, it would indicate a much wider societal acceptance for such rules.

I'm not so worried about the supreme court ruling -- businesses don't usually succeed or fail based on the justices ruling that their business model isn't technically illegal. I want to live in a world where the community embraces good things, and actively rejects fascists and bigots whether or not it's legal to do so.

I'm completely on supreme court's side in the case of the baker (who are assholes but should have their legal right to be assholes). However, this analogy doesn't work with Facebook or Twitter as they have oligopoly status in terms of access to mass audience: there are hundreds of different bakeries that you can choose from, but there's just a couple of SV companies can very effectively silence you.

I still don't know what would be an effective solution to this problem, but giving these giants the same freedom to do whatever as a small business enjoys just feels wrong.

Nobody here noticed the difference between "refusing to serve a customer" and "not wanting to to business with other unethical businesses". Gitlab could definitely chose with which other business they associate, and that would not mean allowing to target minorities. But every customer-facing business should not be allowed to refuse their service to anyone, because you're right, it would very easily lead to cases like the one you're describing.

We also agreed not to discriminate service based on race. It's a similar matter but nobody thinks that was a good idea [to discriminate]. Freedom of association has limits.