Nope. Private is private, and only socialists try to blur the distinction. Malls have developed as private enterprises and largely replaced "Main Street" because that's what free market consumers want. One of the things they want is to shop in a place where a private security force enforced stricter standards than are enforced on Main Street.
Socialists tried to make the same sort of arguments about the Boy Scouts, bringing up all sorts of reasons why they should be classified as subject to laws which are only applicable to public entities, and should lose the right to set their own membership requirements, just because they got very big and successful.
I definately don't disagree. Yet, I think we all should find it troubling that citizens no longer have a public place for political speech. Where *is* the public square?
One of the most precious of our freedoms is our unalianable right to criticize the government and to tell our fellow citizens about it. The internet has done a good job with sites like these to help air national issues, but where do townspeople criticize town politics. How do local watch dogs get the word out to local people that the mayor is scoundrel? Often the local press is nothing more than an ad rag. Government scrinker suggests that main street died because of free market forces. That is not true. Main street was assasinated by local planning boards and modern traffic engineering policies. The malls didn't replace main street because of private security. Indeed, the lack of security at malls will be one of the many reasons why they will die in a few years. Where would you rather be in a fire, in a mall or on main street? How about a gas attack, or a bomb? Did you ever think about how you would evacuate from a Mall. That's a scary thought.
The malls can't hire enough cops to patrol those huge, desolated parking lots. Also, since malls attract people from a large geographic area, they're more likely to have people in them that don't live in your own town and that you'd rather not have your kids associating with. I won't allow my kids to go to my local mall in the evening when they're teenagers.
My town, on the other hand, is a safe community. Now if the planning board would simply relax some of the silly zoning laws, we could actually have a nice commercial center right in my town. Currently, we can't have a nice center because the zoning laws and the county's traffic engineer won't allow it. So if you own property, you con't open a nice cafe, or movie house or shops with apartments on top; even though it's your private property that you own. The only thing you're allowed to build is a single family house.
The mall has a government monopoly, because it's the only place where the zoning laws allow such a concentration of commerce.
Do you still think the mall owners have no obligation to allow political speech?