11 ms·

> Refusing to serve a customer when you disagree with that customer's goal is pretty far from being a "moral arbiter for society." This sounds really good unti

by madrox 7y ago

> Refusing to serve a customer when you disagree with that customer's goal is pretty far from being a "moral arbiter for society." 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. Is that the world you want to live in?

kelnos 7y ago
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.
- dTal 7y ago
  Hah, ninja'd. We wrote the same comment, except mine's longer.
- dmode 7y ago
  What about refusing to serve black people ? This was literally the premise of civil rights.
  - inlined 7y ago
    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.
    - greglindahl 7y ago
      Doesn't Colorado explicitly ban discrimination against gay people?
  - kelnos 7y ago
    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.
  - klyrs 7y ago
    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.
- radarsat1 7y ago
  > 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.
  - kelnos 7y ago
    "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.
    - mike00632 7y ago
      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.
    - radarsat1 7y ago
      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."
- dlp211 7y ago
  > 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.
  - squilliam 7y ago
    >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.
    - dlp211 7y ago
      But that was not determined by this SCOTUS case and remains an open question to the best of my knowledge.
    - pgcj_poster 7y ago
      > 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.
  - kelnos 7y ago
    > 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.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > 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.
- undersuit 7y ago
  OK, but are they a private business? Are they a small reservation only shop, preferably not located on commercially zoned land?
anarchodev 7y ago
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.
bcrosby95 7y ago
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.
- greglindahl 7y ago
  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.
  - Bendingo 7y ago
    > "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.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
dTal 7y ago
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.
- growse 7y ago
  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.
  - wolco 7y ago
    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.
    - mijamo 7y ago
      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.
golergka 7y ago
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.
brandmeyer 7y ago
> 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-rules-narrowly-for-baker-in-same-sex-wedding-cake-case/ https://www.scotusblog.com/2018/06/opinion-analysis-court-ru...
- eplanit 7y ago
  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.
  - joshuamorton 7y ago
    > 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.
    - belorn 7y ago
      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.
megous 7y ago
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.
cameronbrown 7y ago
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.
RandomTisk 7y ago
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.
tacocataco 7y ago
I never understood why a gay couple wouldn't want to support a gay wedding cake baker.
sunderw 7y ago
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.

by madrox 7y ago

kelnos 7y ago

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.

dTal 7y ago
Hah, ninja'd. We wrote the same comment, except mine's longer.
dmode 7y ago
What about refusing to serve black people ? This was literally the premise of civil rights.
- inlined 7y ago
  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.
  - greglindahl 7y ago
    Doesn't Colorado explicitly ban discrimination against gay people?
- kelnos 7y ago
  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.
- klyrs 7y ago
  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.
radarsat1 7y ago
> 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.
- kelnos 7y ago
  "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.
  - mike00632 7y ago
    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.
  - radarsat1 7y ago
    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."
dlp211 7y ago
> 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.
- squilliam 7y ago
  >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.
  - dlp211 7y ago
    But that was not determined by this SCOTUS case and remains an open question to the best of my knowledge.
  - pgcj_poster 7y ago
    > 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.
- kelnos 7y ago
  > 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.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> 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.
undersuit 7y ago
OK, but are they a private business? Are they a small reservation only shop, preferably not located on commercially zoned land?

anarchodev 7y ago

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.

bcrosby95 7y ago

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.

greglindahl 7y ago
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.
- Bendingo 7y ago
  > "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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

dTal 7y ago

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.

growse 7y ago
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.
- wolco 7y ago
  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.
  - mijamo 7y ago
    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.

golergka 7y ago

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.

brandmeyer 7y ago

> 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-rules-narrowly-for-baker-in-same-sex-wedding-cake-case/ https://www.scotusblog.com/2018/06/opinion-analysis-court-ru...

eplanit 7y ago
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.
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  > 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.
  - belorn 7y ago
    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.

megous 7y ago

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.

cameronbrown 7y ago

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.

RandomTisk 7y ago

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.

tacocataco 7y ago

I never understood why a gay couple wouldn't want to support a gay wedding cake baker.

sunderw 7y ago

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.