[Susquehanna Patriot]

Regarding your “interesting question” question...

As you note, the government can become implicated in 1st Amendment-type of interactions between non-governmental participants (e.g. licensing the airwaves, public businesses)- usually where one of the participants wants to force the other to do / not do something opposed by the other. The question - what is the “right principle” may be decided more by practicality than by principle.

The cake baker’s speech or religious beliefs can be controlled quite easily by financial penalties - up to the point of shutting down a business. Today it is not feasible for e telephone company to listen to all calls. It is also not technically practical to be able to identify and control all speech that it won’t carry. Voice recognition technology,, as good as it may seem is not there...yet. Google falls somewhere in between and China is one of the leaders of the pack in controlling internet content - and that control starts with the search words in the search engine.

Maybe another question to be considered when answering the question - What is the right principle? - should practicality / feasibility be a deciding factor in a society where individual freedom needs to be protected from government overreach and others seeking to use the government to control others’ thoughts, speech and religious beliefs?

This new case in Colorado is a reaction, a pushing back. It would not have arisen but for the case that preceded it. It goes to the heart of the left’s justification for using the government to force another to bake a cake or ruin him financially.

[a fool in paradise]

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2008/12/child_named_after_adolf_hitler.html
Child named after Adolf Hitler is refused cake request
2008

ASTON, Pa. — Three-year-old Adolf Hitler Campbell is cute, cuddly and, for now, blissfully unaware of the shock value conveyed by his first and middle names. That may be changing, though.

The youngster was at the center of a recent dispute between his parents and a local supermarket that refused to spell out his name on a cake for his birthday party last weekend. A story in a local newspaper prompted an outpouring of angry online responses directed at Heath Campbell, 35, and his wife Deborah, 25...

[nathanbedford]

I think it is a very useful to distinguish between the harm caused by the repression of speech (or the compulsion of speech) when done by the government as opposed to when it is done by the individual. This is a distinction rarely acknowledged by the left because the left wants to control all individual behavior through the government and so it never will acknowledge either that the government has no business regulating speech or that such regulation when done by the government is worse than when done by a private entity.

Nathan Bedford's Maxim, all politics in America is not local but ultimately racial comes into play here. The left believes that racial discrimination is so heinous that it is not just proper but morally required to deploy government to stop individuals from discriminating. In Europe, where I live, it is advanced beyond this point and it has become the job of government to enforce civility in speech which might offend some group. A conservative naturally reacts in horror, believing that the government has far more capacity and far more leverage to do evil than an individual.

So if were talking about principle vs. practicality, I think a great problem is we have lost sight of the principal of individual sovereignty and collective tyranny.