People planning to attend a rally this weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia featuring white supremacist Richard Spencer were sent scrambling for alternative lodging after Airbnb made it clear it doesn’t want their business.
. . .
Airbnb became aware of these users after examining posts on The Daily Stormer — a neo-Nazi site with tabs dedicated to “race war” and the “Jewish problem” — by people who said they using the service to book lodging to attend “Unite the Right,” as well as larger venues to throw parties associated with the event. An undisclosed number of cases were investigated before the decision to close user accounts was reached.
Affected users, and supporters sympathetic to white nationalist causes, took to various social media platforms to complain about the removals, with some even calling for a boycott of the service.
(source)
Gotta love that last paragraph. What's the basis of complaints? Right there in the Airbnb terms of service agreement is a non-discrimination policy that clearly states "Bias, prejudice, racism, and hatred have no place on our platform or in our community." You violate the terms of service, Airbnb can shut you down. Duh.
Predictably, mouth-breathers shared their faulty logic on social media. Two comments at Yahoo (each of which has garnered more than a thousand thumbs up) typify their cluelessness:
If Air B'N'B can refuse to contract with people with whose political beliefs it does not agree, then a baker can refuse to bake a cake for people with whose lifestyle it does not agree. Fair is fair, correct?
and
If gays can sue over who and who don't bake wedding cakes, cater same sex weddings or offer them lodging then its time for these people to sue Air BnB
Other posters made analogies whining about how businesses should then be able to refuse service to Muslims yadda yadda yadda.
But these nimrods completely miss the point.
Okay, so I'm not a lawyer, and I don't play one on TV. But has 50+ years of civil rights law just passed these people by? Sure, discrimination against some classes of people is proscribed by law. Nationally, The Civil Rights Act of 1964 offers protection based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and The Americans With Disabilities Act added another protected class of people. In recent years some but not all states have passed civil rights laws or regulations that have added sexual orientation as a protected class of people.
But no state has added "White Nationalist" or "Neonazi" as a protected class. Sure, these losers can file lawsuits. They just can't expect to win.
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thank you! we need more of this around here :-)
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