Why should Apple be apolitical? Apple, as any other privately held company, should be what its owners - i.e. its voting shareholders - want it to be. Shareholders express such desires by voting for the board, and the board places a guy in charge who is the spokesperson for the company. If the guy in charge voices a particular opinion in his role as a CEO, then he's speaking for the company, and ultimately, for the shareholders. Do you expect the shareholders to be utterly apolitical?

Furthermore, the political view that is voiced is not even necessarily matched by the shareholders, but they can expect the company to voice it for the sake of PR. Given the stereotypical Apple customer, this seems like a smart strategy. Then there are employees, who do expect a some degree of political alignment from the companies they work for - and, again, given the overall IT culture in US, and especially in the Silicon Valley, being firmly pro-gay-rights provides Apple with a good public image from hiring perspective.

If you don't like it, why, go ahead and voice your displeasure by selling your AAPL stock. If enough people will do it, the company will notice. You have the shares, right? If not, then why are you even bitching about this in the first place?

It's a positive message insofar as it works toward reducing discrimination. Or at least most of Apple's customers will see it that way, which is what matters. And "slandering" is, of course, just your subjective politicized twist.

Not at all. This is a crucial difference. Note that you can still seek redress against corporations if you want (e.g. by organizing boycotts and such), but it's a different ballpark if you want to seek such redress via courts and other means provided by the state - which meansusing state power to achieve redress. So, again, this isn't state using its power to make it more difficult - it's state withdrawing its power to make it more difficult (because otherwise that power is used to make it easier).

At no point did I say that it's okay. It's a bad law, and I think that state power should be used to combat discrimination like that. I just want us to be perfectly clear about what exactly we're doing here - which is using the power of the state to force people to do a certain thing, because the social value of that thing is higher than the negative of infringing on their freedom (of speech and association). I also want to make clear the difference between private discrimination (limited by the fundamental protections the law provides to everyone), and discrimination by the state (which basically has no limits as to how far it can go).

Obviously, the state not allowing itself to intervene is obviously not an exercise of the power of the state - it's an exercise in restraint of said power.

The actual discriminatory power in this case comes from the individuals and corporations that discriminate - if there are none willing to do so, or if there are few enough and their scale is small, then it's all of no consequence. Even if said discrimination is pervasive, it is still limited to what private entities can legally do - so it's a very far cry from what government-powered discrimination can do (for example, it is not legal for corporations in the USA to summarily round up their customers and murder them in gas chambers; or to incarcerate them because they married a person of a different race).

But you feel entitled to tell people how they should act and whether they should grovel in front of your imaginary buddy?

That country is fucked up.

Nope, just that it makes them look for outlets. If legal, great, if not, well, hormones beat laws.

When their privacy is violated, it makes headlines.

When they violate ours, it's business as usual.

What makes you believe that those are Cook's personal politics, and not Apple's corporate politics? If corporations are persons, then they can also have legitimate political positions.

Also, why do you believe that this is ruining the corporate image of Apple, rather than enhancing it?

From past experience (e.g. Jim Crow), we know that in some cases allowing people to discriminate results in discrimination so pervasive that it severely affects the targeted group - basically, they're unable to obtain the services anywhere, or they can only obtain them for significantly higher prices or significantly lower quality.

It is generally legal to refuse service to anyone, except for certain explicitly protected categories (gender, age, religion etc). The catch is that on the federal level, the said protected category list does not include sexual orientation. In some states, it is protected on state level. In some, it's not protected on state level, but is protected on the municipal level. The latter is especially common in large metro areas (which lean liberal pretty much everywhere) in otherwise conservative states.

So, basically, the reason why that law makes a difference is because it overrides various municipal bylaws prohibiting such discrimination, and carves out a religious exemption that pretty much anyone can arbitrarily claim in practice.

And yes, businesses can arbitrarily discriminate in other ways. They can refuse to serve intoxicated customers, for example, or people with mustaches (though in some cases discriminating based on some trait can be illegal if it is found that in practice it results in clear discrimination against some protected class by virtue of correlation).

They can be either, it all depends on how you set things up. If you have some notion of membership, and only serve members, then you can apply pretty much arbitrary filters for people wanting to become members, including those protected classes - i.e. it's perfectly legal to have a whites-only private club, for example (though of course you'll get a lot of flak in the media as soon as it comes out).

And to further clarify. The problem with exceptions is that as soon as you open the gates, you need some safeguards to prevent your exceptions from growing so numerous as to effectively render the right useless. Which means that you can just allow arbitrary exceptions for free speech, or vague blanket categories that are not protected. It has to be very, very narrow for the original right to remain meaningfully protected.

For example, by codifying the eligible exceptions into the same document that enumerates the rights, and asserting that anything that is not so codified is not an exception.

You missed my point. It's not at all clear why the display of a US flag in the context of Cinco de Mayo has anything to do with anti-immigration sentiment. I would argue that such interpretation, in the absence of any other context, is in fact rather bigoted itself (because it assumes that flag = hate).

And who decides what are those cases where the right should be limited? Are you aware of the track record of such limitations?

For example, you bring up that famous line "fire in a crowded theater". But do you know its origin? It's from a SCOTUS case that ruled that anti-war speech encouraging draft resistance is not protected speech (this was during WW1). As a result, a number of people from the US Socialist party were jailed for distribution of leaflets with anti-war propaganda.

Luckily, that decision was overturned later, and now the standard for speech that gets outside of the protected boundary is when it can trigger "imminent lawless action". Wearing the flags is obviously a very far cry from that, even if you're right about their meaning (though I do think that it's extremely biased on your behalf to treat the mere presentation of flag as "deport anchor babies").

Not at all. Nuremberg Laws placed a large number of state-enforced prohibitions on what Jews can do. These laws do not do such a thing - they enable private discrimination of homosexuals, but they don't enforce it by the power of the state.

At least one popular theory is that said charismatic leader is Paul, and Jesus was just a figure that he appropriated for his purposes (elevating him to godhood status in the process).