Last Friday evening, Twitter permanently banned President Trump from their platform. Google, Apple and Amazon immediately followed suit by booting the “free speech” platform Parler, which conservatives flocked to as an alternative to Twitter, from its respective app stores and web services. But the liberal hosts of The View were not alarmed by these heavy-handed decisions by big tech and even compared it to the infamous Supreme Court case of a Colorado baker who refused to bake a same-sex wedding cake.
Co-host Whoopi Goldberg opened the segment comparing tech giants Twitter, Apple, Google and Amazon's actions to Christian baker, Jack Phillips, declining to bake a same-sex wedding cake, in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado. Whoopi strangely suggested the left was always in favor of Phillips right to say no:
"They have every right to say, ‘I don't want you using my site,’ much like the baker who said, ‘I don't want to bake for gay people.’ Same thing. Everybody said, ‘listen, he has the right do that.’ So do all these companies have the right to say, ‘I don’t want you on my stuff,'" Whoopi stated. Joy Behar, Sara Haines and Sunny Hostin agreed this was the right of a private business and not a First Amendment issue.
"These are private companies, and so they have every right to do this, you know, the First Amendment really relates to government action and not the action of private companies,” Hostin stated.
But this wasn't The View hosts' position in 2017, when Jack Phillips appeared on the show. At the time, the hosts were hostile to his objections, repeatedly hammering their Christian guest for being "judgmental." Joy Behar tag teamed with former host Paula Faris (still with ABC News) to demand that "Jesus would've baked the cake:"
PAULA FARIS: Did you ever ask yourself what would Jesus do in this particular situation? Instead of denying them, do you think maybe Jesus would have said I don't accept this but I'm going to love you anyways?
(...)
JOY BEHAR: You don’t? Oh come on. Jesus would have made the cake.
Whoopi was not present during this interview. But just the day before she gave her opinion on the matter, saying that religious freedom didn't extend to actually living out your convictions:
WHOOPI GOLDBERG: Your religious freedom allows you to say I'm uncomfortable with this. It does not allow you to discriminate because it used to be -- you know, this goes to this idea that there's this war on religion. There's no war on Christianity or religion because you get to believe what you want to believe.
When the Supreme Court ruled in Phillips' favor in 2018, The View again reacted negatively to the decision that favored a "private business," with Whoopi calling it a "slippery slope" that could lead Christians to use the Bible discriminate against blacks.
Meghan McCain was the only host to disagree completely and called out tech giants like Twitter for still giving violent dictators platforms on their site:
I fear censorship. I fear the amount of huge power that big tech has over all of us. Basically five dorks in silicon valley are having more power than anyone else in the entire world. The ACLU has come out against this. Twitter is incredibly inconsistent on this. The people that do have platforms on Twitter include the Ayatollah, the People’s Republic of China, Vladimir Putin, [Nicolas] Maduro...
She added:
If Twitter wants to do this, they have to be really consistent because there's a lot of people with a lot of platforms who are still on there. I don't think anyone on this show thinks the Ayatollah Khamenei calling for the extermination of Jewish people and Western culture, should still have this kind of platform. So if they’re going to deplatform Trump, they have to be consistent. I do think that Russia's influence in Silicon Valley is something that's going to be a huge, huge issue going forward. It hasn't evaporated just because Biden is elected president.
Secret and Biotene sponsor The View, contact them at the Conservatives Fight Back page here.
