Comment by thaumaturgy
9 years ago
This discussion would be getting pretty far off-topic, but a lot of thoughtful people would argue that the line isn't clear at all. At the least, marriage confers legal benefits to a couple, including rights during medical emergencies and upon death, and if anyone really "chooses" their sexuality, they do so long before they are at an age to make that choice consciously, and yet long after they can change their mind about it.
I don't think you can justify allowing a business to refuse service on the basis of sexuality using the logic that prevents businesses from refusing service to different skin colors.
I do understand your point about choosing vs not-choosing. A marriage doesn't require the flowers to receive the named benefits above, just a visit to the courthouse though.
In your opinion, how are the two situations different (CloudFlare vs The Florist)?
The only honest answer I have right now is, I don't know. I posted a comment elsethread essentially asking for opinions on this.
I have my personal ideals -- gay marriage is fine, racism is not -- but those aren't perfectly congruent with what I think a society should codify as law, especially where free speech is concerned.
I think a lot of the debate people are having is over whether they want a nice society or a free one. A completely free society isn't very nice; a perfectly nice society isn't free. Somewhere in the middle is where most of us want to be, but we keep getting hung up on hypotheticals and the ideals behind rallying cries like "free speech!" and so no actual progress is being made.
In this particular case, CloudFlare isn't claiming to be developing a new policy -- they aren't refusing service to all neo-Nazi groups -- and I would support any florist's right to refuse service to a couple if they showed up and went out of their way to piss off the florist, regardless of their sexuality.
But there's an awfully big gray area in there and frankly I support CloudFlare's position a lot more because I like lgbtq people a hell of a lot more than I like neo-Nazis.
I think we would both agree our views on Nazis are summed up by a scene from the Blues Brothers haha. I appreciate your honesty, that's incredible to admit, and I completely agree.
A free society can be nice as well!
"nice" and "free" are not symmetrical concepts.
Being nice but not free works for today, but has no guarantee of working for tomorrow. Being free means that we have the ability to evolve our ideas and work towards niceness for all of the future as well.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
An unfree society gives up the ability to evolve and dies, even if it buys us convenient niceness on a short term. An unfree society lowers our chances of being nice tomorrow.
> In your opinion, how are the two situations different (CloudFlare vs The Florist)?
I think there are at least two distinctions.
The first and most important distinction is that it's actually very feasible to write laws that protect LGBT people. You can't discriminate on that basis, and it's very clear what discriminating on that basis means (well actually all discrimination is thorny and hard to prove/disprove, but LGBT and race exhibit the same set of issues, and we seem to be in agreement that we should figure out how to make racial discrimination illegal.)
Conversely, political belief is an almost impossibly fuzzy line, since at the end of the day pretty much everything is political.
For example, I think we can all agree that I should be allowed to refuse to serve customers who are being completely unreasonable and hostile assholes to me. This happens every Friday night at bars across the country.
But what if those people are being assholes by coming into my Jewish-owned-and-operated pharmacy and loudly talking about exterminating the Jews while buying a bar of soap? Clearly they are being assholes, but they're being assholes by being political. So, can I discriminate and tell them to leave? And if not, is it the case that now any asshole can talk about raunchy sex is a family restaurant or be a complete dick to the bar keep as long as they find a way to weave politics into their speech?
(BTW, apparently the turning point in this case was Daily Stormer or whatever claiming that CloudFlare secretly supports them. So in my mind this was closer to kicking someone out of the bar for being an asshole to management, rather than political discrimination. "You can be a nazi in my bar, but if you go around telling people that just because I let you talk about killing jews in my bar I'm somehow in on the neo-nazi movement, then you need to never come back here.")
So, the first distinction is that protecting LGBT is about as difficult as protecting racial classes but protecting political speech seems pretty intractable, form a legal perspective, without turning public spaces into unusable cesspools.
The second distinction -- and I do think this is a distinction that a free and just society is capable of making -- is the obvious difference between being gay and being a Nazi. E.g., Germany doesn't tolerate public support of Nazis and it's a fairly free and open society -- in some ways more free than the USA, even with respect to certain forms of speech. So for me the jury is out on whether that's a good or a bad idea, but we should at least stop treating "silencing Nazis leads to a terrible unfree society" like an axiom, since there are clear and obvious empirical counter-examples. This assertion without qualification is just false, end of story.