If Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A announce tomorrow morning that they are refusing service to all people who voted for a Democratic candidate in the last few election cycles (something that's within the realm of plausibility), what would be your initial reaction?
>Are you saying you want to take that freedom away from private businesses?
>You did not answer the question - Do you want to take that freedom away from American businesses?
Yes, I absolutely am. I am proposing that we legally enshrine political ideology as a protected class, as has been the common custom in the US until very recently. Freedom of speech is the most fundamental human right, and it needs to be protected in all venues, both public and private. Infringing on corporate personhood is a small price to pay for a free and open society.
Edit: (comment thread is too deep and not able to reply directly)
The recent trend of trying to silence political opponents represents an existential threat to our democracy. I'm really baffled how others in this thread are not able to see why that is. Nowhere in this discussion have I claimed to be persecuted, or have I even established what my political leanings are.
Political ideology is a choice, and as such, not protected by the civil rights act of 1964.
You can wish you were a victim of persecution for your political choice, but it is still your choice, and as such, people can also choose to not employ or serve you for your decision.
Opinions and ideology might be mutable but they are not a choice. You get convinced into them, this is not something that you can just choose.
Anyway, I would argue that simply protecting immutable characteristics without also protecting certain actions does not make sense. For example it makes no sense to protect sexual orientation but not the action of holding your partner's hand in public or publically saying that you are of a certain orientation - after all your employer/person that you are doing business with would likely not know your sexual orientation without doing either of the above actions.
> legally enshrine political ideology as a protected class
“Political ideology” is infinitely extensible. To enshrine it as a protected class removed all meaning from the latter.
> as has been the common custom in the US until very recently
The Revolutionary War was a political question. How were Loyalists treated? Following that, how did Federalists and Jeffersonians interact in the social sphere? More recently, how did the labour union debate get peacefully resolved? Or American participation in WWI get non-violently debated?
My initial reaction - I've been trying to get all my Democratic-voting friends to stop paying money to Chick-fil-A. If they want to do it for me, great.
Now, I might think that Chick-fil-A is making a bad business decision, but part of what it means to be in America is that you have the freedom to make bad decisions.
Certainly, as someone who has voted Democrat, is religious, and is not white, I believe that the three of those are of quite different levels of voluntary choice on my behalf and I don't think that laws/social norms that apply to the most involuntary of those should apply without change to the most voluntary of those.
