Wow, you guys are still on this...?
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Originally Posted by corona
What bothers me is that when retailers become so huge and influential, on the supply side as well, they can really impact what marginalized people have the opportunity to purchase....
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That's a nice theory, but most of us no longer live in a world where the only place to buy CD's is the local Walmart. There are almost no such barriers online, especially if the alternate retailer / publisher are willing to eschew DRM.
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Originally Posted by corona
Wikileaks -- who so far retain the presumption of innocence -- has been seriously hampered by the refusal of the merchant banks to handle their donations.
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That's sort of like saying Al Qaeda should only be regarded as a terrorist group after they've been convicted.
No one should be forced to do business with Wikileaks, if they don't like what that organization is doing.
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Originally Posted by corona
The kind of public services in which discrimination is prohibited, in Canada at least, can in some cases be provided by non-governmental or commercial organizations. I'd like to see what would happen if a bank, for instance, refused to offer mortgages to gay people.
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Amazon is not a bank with a history of redlining. They are not refusing to serve anyone based on any of the categories listed.
In addition, Amazon has absolutely no, I repeat no, obligations to carry content that they deem "objectionable." If I write a book advocating the genocidal slaughter of Group X, and Amazon refuses to carry it, is that "discrimination against Genocidalists?" Should I receive moral or legal support to force Amazon to wholly commit to its marketing claims that they will carry "every book ever?"
Nor are they issuing a broadside against gays. Last I checked there were well over 700,000 commercial ebook titles available via Amazon; blocking 7 titles, for example, means they've blocked a whopping 0.001% of their titles.
They've also yanked a few titles featuring (straight) incest erotica, pedophilia, and due to copyright issues.
If Amazon decided to drop every single title in their "Gay & Lesbian" sections, then you'd have a point. When they drop 7 books that can be validly construed as depicting pedophilia, while leaving thousands of other books that describe or depict homosexual activities, then viewing this as "discriminatory" is a patently absurd example of excessive sensitively.