> The gay couple's cake is a category of _people_ being refused service. The gun assembly video is a category of _topic_ being censored. So should it be OK for

> The gay couple's cake is a category of _people_ being refused service. The gun assembly video is a category of _topic_ being censored. So should it be OK for a bakery to refuse to bake wedding cakes for gay couples, as long as it's willing to bake other kinds of products for gay people? In other words, it's refusing only to provide service to the specific topic of gay marriage, not gay people generally; gay people can still use the rest of the bakery's services, just not services involving gay weddings specifically. E.g., a gay person can order a cake for another straight person's wedding, or can order any other product. As a thought experiment, this should suffice to categorize the bakery's action as a "topic" being refused service (gay marriage) rather than category of people. I have to agree with the original comment that it does seem spurious that companies in some cases are allowed to choose their customers, and are not in others. I understand that laws have been passed to create these distinctions, but I don't see a solid ethical foundation underlying which distinctions should to be protected or not. At some point it feels to me like the services offered by these companies will become so integral to the fabric of society that they'll become "public goods" of a sort. Would we tolerate it if the phone company refused service to gun's rights advocates, or if airlines or bus companies refused them transportation? In legal fact, perhaps they could, but in reality they do not - however, Internet firms like Google and Facebook ban large swaths of content off their platforms. As the Internet becomes vital to our lives and interpersonal communication, it's beginning to feel unfair that private companies have such tremendous and capricious control over these pseudo-public spaces.