Comment by throwawayjava

> 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.