honorentheos wrote:Because this can't be the threshold. Removed from the law, moral arguments rely on personal judgment with gatekeepers who determine who gets in and who doesn't on the grounds. She could be morally correct to you and have acted amorally in someone else's opinion and you would be left to say as you have, "They have bad judgment."
You don't seem to be dealing with the fact that it is legal to discriminate services based on political views, or any number of other reasons, and this has not led to a fundamental tension that has brought down public accommodation laws. We can understand your argument mean:
1) If seriously accepted, the logic of allowing people to refuse service to anyone on the basis of any of their beliefs or actions logically undermines any justification for any legal prohibition of businesses discriminating against protected classes of people.
or
2) This fact will lead to the collapse of public accommodation laws.
You seem to be arguing both, but you're supplying zero reason to think either are true and the latter seems to be plainly contradicted by years of public accommodation laws existing without any serious challenge coming from the fact that it is perfectly legal to kick politicians out of businesses because of disapproval of their actions. You're writing almost as if you think refusing service to Sanders was legally questionable. At present time, it isn't. Unlike you, critics of the restaurant are focused on the impropriety of their actions, not the legality of them.
I don't care for public accommodations laws, and would welcome a demonstration that an action like this undermines the justification for them at all, but I'm skeptical this can be successfully argued. And really, if you do argue it, you are making a case that a Goebbels who hasn't been unfortunate enough to be on the losing side of a war ought to have a legal right to be served at whatever business he wants, by whomever he wants - including Jews - without interference. If you think that, great, but have courage in your convictions then. I think such a demonstration would reveal a moral rot at the center of those laws. If public accommodations logically cannot exist as a carve out from people's general freedom of association, then they should not exist.
You're relying on the notion that people can judge appropriately where and when public accommodation can be trumped by a person making a value judgment so we must allow for that.
You can't escape the need to have people making sound value judgments about what sorts of activities can and cannot be discriminated against by retreating into the law. The law makes distinctions and the authors and ratifiers of the law have to display sound judgment in the distinctions it makes. We necessarily are forced to rely on people's ability to make sound judgements. Otherwise, you are advocating for simple anarchy where a person has a legal right to be in a private establishment open to the public regardless of their behavior. No one, including you, seriously thinks or wants that.