My position is not that Papa John’s is a restaurant, my position is that restaurants are public accommodations while bakeries are not, according to federal law. You sound like a real expert on Papa Johns, so I will concede your point: sounds like a Papa Johns could probably get away with discrimination.  

Unfortunately, those are both good reasons for why we find it so difficult to get rid of old assholes like Young. He’s been in office forever, and is pretty well connected and chairs some important committees. And when you’ve got a young, poorly populated, expensive state like Alaska with fewer representatives than…

Don Young is a fucking troglodyte, and we are all very embarrassed by him. He has been rude to me and my family personally on multiple occasions, and always manages to find a way to make agreeable positions (such as the one he was advocating for during that clip) sound very disagreeable indeed. He makes a great case…

I agree with you about what “should” happen. I guess I just weigh the likelihood of the worst case scenarios on both ends of the spectrum differently... do I think it’s likely that we’ll ever go back to being a country where entire classes of people are refused services by the majority of vendors? Nah, not really...…

Not if they’re attached to a gas station. I’m getting tired of this.

Look, I’m not writing a fucking brief just to vindicate myself to a bunch of assholes on the internet, but let me give it a shot. Congress and the Supreme Court both thought it prudent to stop short of lumping all businesses together as public accommodations, and instead drew the line at those businesses that play…

“No State shall...pass any...law impairing the obligation of contracts.” There isn’t an explicit ‘right to contract’ or ‘right to do business’ in the constitution, but for those who believe it exists (and I’d wager there’s a few in the Court right now), that’s part of it.

I understand just fine. I just happen to think that bakeries aren’t public accommodations as envisioned by Congress and the Supreme Court, and thus are free to discriminate on whatever grounds they want. Colorado disagrees and has lumped all businesses great and small together as public accommodations, but I think…

I am, and I don’t think this is about protected classes so much as limits on the states’ ability to expand the meaning of public accommodations. Climb off your high horse.

I’ll admit, I kinda mixed common carrier up with public accommodation when I was first typing my initial posts before refreshing myself on some case law. They’re related, but yeah, I agree that public accommodations are the more relevant thing to be looking at. But public accommodations absolutely are those that have…

The Supreme Court drew the line between restaurants and other businesses that prepare food, not me. And the line isn’t drawn based on how nice or expensive the place is, but on whether it sells food for immediate consumption on the premises or not. Because eat-on-the-premises places are essential for interstate…

The Supreme Court disagreed. If you’re traveling, you need to eat, and you may not be traveling with a kitchen and utensils at your disposal, so you need to be able to go to places that serve food for immediate consumption. So insofar as we all need to have the right to travel freely, we all need a lunch counter. It’s…

No, because Papa Johns is a restaurant. You may not see a big difference between a restaurant and a bakery, but Congress and the Supreme Court have. *shrug*

They would be free to do so... if they weren’t running afoul of Article 1 Section 10 by infringing on people’s ability to freely contract in the process. I think Heart of Atlanta is relevant, because it shows that the Supreme Court was only willing to burden a very narrow slice of businesses, not all people engaged in…

I disagree that this is about whether sexual orientation is a protected class. It’s pretty much already there (and several states recognize it as one), and if it isn’t yet for the Supreme Court, it soon will be. I think the issue is more about whether states can expand the definition of “public accommodation” to…

Yeah, well, my point kind of is that I don’t think there is a line of cases saying that bakers can’t deny cakes to black people. I see that a couple states have expanded “public accommodation” to include all businesses of all types, but I don’t think that expansion is actually constitutionally permitted, and goes way…

I understand the distinction you’re getting at, and I agree they’re different things. But I still feel like the underlying Supreme Court precedent in Heart of Atlanta and federal law in 42 USC 2000a only go so far as to carve out a very narrow subset of businesses that aren’t allowed to discriminate, out of a…

Someone else pointed out in the replies that Colorado does too, so there’s a few. But I’m concerned that Article 1 Section 10 stops states from going so far as to tell all businesses of all sorts how to do business. We’ll see.

Well, I didn’t realize Colorado had that expansive of a law. Huh, good for them. I’m not sure it’s constitutional for them to expand it that far beyond the federal definition (the Supreme Court in Heart of Atlanta v US leaned kind of heavy on the fact that the Civil Rights Act wasn’t trying to apply itself to all busin…

1. “Protected class” is not a magic word that protects that class from all unequal treatment from everyone. All it does is stop the government from making laws that disadvantage that class without a compelling government interest. Protected classes can be discriminated against by private persons the same as anyone…