Ask HN: Can you legally deny selling software to someone on ethical grounds?

Let them quit. Your company will be better without such extreme zealots

It could be quite bad for morale to keep their business. You'll probably have a group that quit, plus the ones that are left but still would be unsettled by you valuing a bit of $ over principles.

That said, I don't think the Supreme Court ruling covers your case (you don't have a religious objection), so you might want to get council.

Kinda. What SCOTUS actually ruled is that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission violated the Free Exercise Clause, and so essentially threw the case out. The opinion very clearly states that this exception to the anti-discrimination laws are not going to set precedent for future exceptions and that the bar in the future will be even higher due to various changes in the law from the time of the incident.

One article I quickly dug up that seems to give it a fair treatment: https://qz.com/1296174/scotus-masterpiece-bakery-case-the-su...

> For example, there are several people on our team that are extremely pro-choice. We had a pro-life group sign up recently and these employees are threatening to quit if we accept their money.

kernel.org and gnu.org will gladly give those pro-life people an OS, mozilla.org a browser. Free of charge, and all.

microsoft.com will lavish software upon those pro-lifers, much of it for a fee.

Safeway will sell a loaf of bread and bottle of milk to a pro-lifer.

But some primadonnas don't want their employing software organization to sell them event organizing software?

They really are in the wrong business. Because if you make software for event organizing, half the customers will be groups that half of you don't agree with. That's because events are often political or religious or whatever.

You're not going to have much of an income from organizing bake sale fund raisers for school trips or baby showers --- and what if some on your team are against even that sort of thing?

Let them go and replace them with "pro-money" and "pro-business" team members.

> I think we're all in agreement that if the KKK signed up and wanted to use our software to organize clan rallies we would not be willing to foster hate speech.

I think you might actually have a problem with that one, too, unless you have a policy in place that defines hate speech and that it's not allowed on your platform. Even the KKK has freedom of speech, and there isn't an actual law about "hate speech,"[2] and the ACLU routinely goes to bat for the KKK and Nazis to protect their freedom of speech, as well as yours and mine, even though we might not agree with everyone's speech[1].

> The United States does not have hate speech laws, since American courts have repeatedly ruled that laws criminalizing hate speech violate the guarantee to freedom of speech contained in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.[8] There are several categories of speech that are not protected by the First Amendment, such as speech that calls for imminent violence upon a person or group. However, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that hate speech is not one of these categories.[92][not in citation given] Court rulings often must be reexamined to ensure the U.S. Constitution is being upheld in the ruling on whether or not the words count as a violation[2]

There were actually 2 cases about bakers refusing to sell their services to people based on sexual orientation, with 2 different outcomes because the reasons were different. In one case, they had a stated policy against derogatory language/images

> In the first case, the baker refused service to a customer who wanted her to bake a cake with anti-gay Bible verses on it. The customer argued that he was discriminated against because of his religious beliefs. But the court ruled that this was not discrimination because the baker had a consistent policy of refusing to create cakes that used derogatory language or imagery.[3a]

> In the second case, a baker refused to create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, saying that it violated his religious beliefs. The court held the baker liable, saying that his reason was just a pretext for discriminating against gays.[3b]

[1] https://www.aclu.org/other/freedom-expression-aclu-position-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech#United_States

[3] https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/the-right-to-refuse-servi...