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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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This attitude is what turned so many Mottezans away from being principled on this topic, noticing the massive gap between what people say they will do and how they behave in practice. Turns out very few people are really bothered by racism or sexism or discrimination in general, there's several populations that are totally fair targets. Alas, "your rules applied fairly" is not a stable point and assumes people are honest about what their rules are supposed to be.

See the issue otherwise is that editorial control is removed for business owners. Take that LGBT cake incident a while back. If business owners do not have editorial control under the first amendment, then the bakery would likely not have had legal protection over what speech they can and not produce for a client.

Edit: Or even worse, imagine you have an employee go on TV and start insulting your customers. Your customers stop buying from you, but you can't fire the employee. You are compelled to give him a job no matter how much he sabotages your company because to do so otherwise would be violating his free speech, despite the fact that it's your private company!

Are they allowed to select by religion? Hmm... looking at FIRE's page I may have been remembering that CLS v Martinez case, that student groups at public universities can't. Vaguely recall some other exception but maybe not.

Yes, student groups at public universities are not the same as a private religious university.

I think the difference boils down to few people really thinking it is appropriate to treat universities, even private ones, like private companies. Considering how a university generally winds up hosting a large part of its students' entire lives, they are really more akin to landlords, power companies or ISPs, whose "editorial rights" to choose and un-choose their customers are greatly circumscribed.

(Before you call gotcha there, yes, I think it should be possible to force Christian, Jewish or Islamic universities to admit gay students. I think this should be especially possible if such universities become in any way dominant; I'm not so bothered by a single low-tier small Islamic school practicing full Sharia law, and wouldn't be bothered if there were a handful of designated low-prestige SJW schools that require any white students who join to undergo a humiliation ritual either, in the spirit of conservationism)