US law can't judge whether someone's beliefs are evil. It needs to have a specific purpose. In this case it's based on an understanding that all people have an equal right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
In my opinion, if a few oddballs didn't want to serve blacks, it might not have been worth a law. But there were communities where blacks couldn't get service from enough establishments that it was affecting their lives. At one point Jews had similar issues. Some communities believe that the same is true of gays.
In general I think there's an expectation that public businesses will treat all customers and potential customers equally. I support that. I would advise people not to go into a business where they would feel they had to discriminate against any class of people.
Intellectually I agree with you. But it goes further with me - I have a particular animus against racists because they are evil, evil in thought, and evil in deed, and they weaken my country. Racists cost us nearly a million lives in the Civil War. They are the source of our great national birth defect.
It's easier to dismiss and forgive a 17th Century slaver than a 21st Century racist. In the 17th Century even the slavers were subjects (not citizens) of some king, and some lord, and some local noble commander. EVERYBODY was in literal dominated, potentially violent subjection to the people above them. Children could be - and were - very routinely beaten by their parents - they were the SUBJECTS of their parents. Wives were routinely beaten by their husbands, and the civil laws enforced the husband's MASTERY over his children. And the Crown and its officials routinely whipped "free" men for failure to show respect.
In the 17th Century, in the white world, there were essentially 13 free men: the King of England, the King of France, the King of Spain, the King of Portugal, the Holy Roman Emperor, the King of Sweden, the King of Denmark, the Tsar of Russia, the Emperor of Austria, the King of Naples, the Sultan of the Ottomans, the Stadthouder of Holland and the Pope. Every other white human alive was a subject of one of those men. There were no citizens, and nobody was a "free" man. Men and women were also in subjection to other men and women below the King, but the grandest lords were the subjects of the King and they had no enforceable rights. Black slaves were at the second to the bottom rung (the very bottom rung was prisoners, who were not simply chained, but tormented for the purpose of tormenting them and the amusement of their jailers).
When EVERYBODY is, in fact if not in name, a slave of somebody else and there are only 13 truly free human beings in the entire white world, the particular aspect of white on black slavery - the special evil of it - largely dissolves into the general evil of society. When everybody is in essence a slave, and some people (not black slaves) are being cut open or burnt alive in the public square, one really cannot consider black slavery to truly be any different from the general human condition of their "masters", for their masters themselves had masters.
In the 21st Century, however, it is quite different. Those social conditions have been swept away for everybody by centuries of violent history, as the white world freed itself from its royal and noble masters, and set limits on the controls human beings can impose on others. Parents can no longer whip their children at will, and husbands have no right to beat their wives at all. Chattel slavery of any skin color is illegal.
Importantly, the 19th Century abolitionist movements were all Christian movements, very rightly rooted in Jesus' laws: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is an outright ban of slavery and beatings, full stop. It is not turnable. The 17th Century structure of government was spitting in the eyes of Jesus every day that it existed. In the 21st Century it no longer exists.
But people who cling to racism are still spitting right in the eyes of Jesus. They deserve to have done unto them what they would do unto the blacks. Of course, individual people are not entitled to punch racists in the face, but in our republics we CAN set rules that allow the police to do it, if the racists get out of line and get ugly. So we have.
When the racists come out, and the police beat them with batons and tear gas them and pepper spray them in the face, that's justice. That's re-establishing the right order of things. Their ideas are wrong, they are evil, their evil beliefs cost us a million lives in the Civil War. We live in democratic republics, we CAN pass laws that force these people to be silent on pain of legal torment, we DO pass such laws, and we ENFORCE them.
Essentially, our laws allow us to torture open racists with loss of money, property, power and rights.
And that's a good thing.
We will certainly continue to do so. Those jerks caused us to kill a million of our own. They lost the right to be respected, and they lost the right to speak those ideas without consequences of pain. They still have the right to speak - and they do - and we have the right to collectively gang up on them with our laws, and physically and economically and in every other way beat them into submission, so they have to hide what they are and shut their mouths.
And we DO that, as a society. And that is good. Racists in the 21st Century have lost the right to openly speak BECAUSE OF all of the death and horror that those evil morons have inflicted in past centuries. We are done with them. They do not have the right to speak. We have passed laws to take that right away from them for all practical purposes. And we will enforce those laws.
If people want to say we are wrong, who cares? Side with the racists and lose. Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.
Tolerance for murderous philosophy has diminished to the vanishing point. No, Nazis and racists, and violent Communists, and Muslim jihadists who want to cut our heads off DON'T have a point. No, they don't have the right to meet in private and plot new mayhem. Yes, we, collectively, can look back at all of the death that these creeps have inflicted and say: no more. You will not meet. You will not speak. You will not kill any more. And if you try, we will take all of your money and kick you down into the gutter where you belong. Those ideas don't belong here. They are the same level of evil as child inappropriate contentography.
If they don't like that? Then they should emigrate, because they are not needed, or wanted here. Be stubborn, we will be more than happy to beat them into silence, because they deserve it. They've already killed enough. It is time for them to be silent - or to be silenced, by force. That is the legal regime of our day, and it is right and just.
Some ideas do not have the right to live any more. Racism is one of them.
