Comment by vaishaksuresh
9 years ago
>Don't wanna sell cakes to gay people or host pro-Nazi sites? Don't start a business serving the public then.
I get what you’re saying and agree with you, but please don’t compare gay people and neo-nazi. They’re not same or even similar.
That was kind of the point. Non-discrimination, like free speech, is worthless if it only applies to things you approve of.
Nazis are not a protected class.
To be honest, the whole idea of protected vs. non-protected classes makes me uncomfortable. Yes, there are some things that force you to compromise your ideals in order to make a workable system, but it's a hack, not a proper solution.
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Free speech, freedom of conscience, and non-discrimination are moral principles that go beyond US federal statute. "US federal law doesn't precisely reflect your moral standpoint" isn't a very good argument against a belief.
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If you get what I'm saying - comparing two well-known instances from different parts of the political spectrum where businesses try and refuse custom for ideological reasons - why are you pretending I'm comparing gay people to neo-Nazis?
Because you choose to be a neo nazi, you don’t choose to be gay. I’m not talking about denying service. I’m saying one of them did not choose to be what they are.
No one is comparing gay people with neo-nazis or saying there is some equivalence, they were just two very different examples to illustrate a point. In fact, what makes it such a good illustration is how different they are from each other.
Let me change it to an example more dear to my own heart:
> Don't wanna hire old programmers or host pro-Nazi sites? Don't start a business serving the public then.
I certainly didn't choose to be an old programmer! It seems to have just happened, maybe by some law of nature. But I'm not offended by being mentioned in the same sentence with pro-Nazi sites. It's pretty obvious that no comparison is being made between the two.
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> Because you choose to be a neo nazi, you don’t choose to be gay.
I agree with you, but many people do not, making it a political statement. Things get very complicated as soon as you abandon the bright line test of "you must serve the whole public."
But the religious groups are a protected class. Religion is something you choose. By that logic, it would be possible to discriminate against "Christians", "Muslims", etc.
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It's not clear that people choose their beliefs - or anything else. That's essentially the free will debate, which is still unsettled.
Suppose one could choose who they have romantic/sexual relationships with. Would that really change the argument here?
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You don't choose to have a certain ideology.
Being gay isn't a position on a political spectrum. Neither is being black. Neither is being female. Being a neo-Nazi is.
I believe the commenter is referring to the political controversies of private businesses refusing service to members of those two groups.
The difference is the people of Colorado through their elected representatives included gays in an anti-discrimination law. Here in Georgia, the bakers would get an medal from the legislature.
Because you are
Right, the distinction is that neo-Nazi's are bad -- hateful, intolerant, divisive, problematic or however you want to put it. I'm uncomfortable saying that it's okay to do these things to the bad guys, even when it's obvious, because in an alternate universe it might be obvious that gays marrying is hateful toward Christians and intolerant of their sacred rituals.
Nobody fought and won war---to the conclusion of unconditional surrender---against an army and ideology of the LGBT community.
Nazism didn't go through some kind of Martin Luther style academic and cultural reformation in the last 80 years. Neo-Nazis are the same as the original Nazis. They have the same ideology & the same ambitions. They're literally incompatible with Western liberalism & enlightenment.
Neo-Nazis are just late-stage Third Reich acolytes, sympathizers, and insurrectionists. They're still trying to fight a war that they lost to terms of unconditional surrender. It's frankly shocking that they're given the deference of being just yet another political voice in the diverse landscape of voices. They are not. Very, very few modern political movements were defeated explicitly at the tip of a spear instead of the stroke of a pen. Nazism is in scarce company in that regard.
There's no point at all to engage any of it as though Nazism is the same as normal political speech. Allowing for ideological recidivism and re-litigating WWII sort of defeats the purpose of having fought that war and conquered them to begin with.
It would make way, way more sense to consider them enemies of the state and deal with them as such.
On point, they are akin to ISIS, perhaps people confuse them for 'just another ideology' just because they are too afraid to act on it right now, but given the opportunity they will, and recruiting people IS their opportunity.
No. The distinction is that neo-nazis chose to follow a hateful ideology. Gay people did not choose to be gay. I’m not supporting denial of service, in fact I think nobody should be denied service. I’m just pointing out that the equivalence is not right.
So if someone chooses to follow evil red anti-American socialist beliefs, it's presumably OK to censor and deplatform them, right? Normalizing political censorship is how you get McCarthyism and the Red Scare. Normalizing political violence is how you get pogroms. It does not matter who the first victims are; you cannot control how the tides will turn in the future.
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> The distinction is that neo-nazis chose to follow a hateful ideology
Did they?