It isn't semantics. We give protected classes extra protections because they are attributes of who a person is. To give the same protections to actions that people do would be wildly different.
A salesperson should be able to be fired for shit-talking their own product. A customer service representative should be able to be fired for treating a customer inappropriately. The editor of a magazine should be allowed to edit contributors' articles. Putting speech on the same level as a protected class is ridiculous.
Courts aren’t machines that evaluate a series of IF statement in vacuums; they look at the entirety of the situation. They’re going to be looking for the root cause of the reason that management has landed on their decision.
Someone mentioning they’re gay after being asked if they have a wife would be a very different situation from someone who, for instance, is engaging people in inappropriate and unwanted discussions of sexuality.
The law is quite simple: was the person fired because of their membership in a protected class?
What do you mean “why isn’t speech codified at the same level”? You mean, why haven’t legislators made a law that protects free speech against discrimination by employers and businesses, in the same way the Civil Rights Act does for religion?
I mean, what other answer is there than what’s implied by that very question: it’s because “legislators haven’t made a law”.
Now you can believe all you want that there’s been a centuries-old conspiracy by legislators to not ever draw up and approve this kind of law. But maybe you should consider that the other things mentioned in the 1st amendment, such as freedom of press, lobbying, and assembly, also aren’t “codified at the same level” as religious protections. And maybe you’ll realize that there are obvious differences in how religion is perceived to be different than the 4 other things protected by the 1A.
If I had intended a "pretty extreme bad faith response", I would've done it in a sentence, not several paragraphs.
To use your analogy, it'd be as if u/deadmik3 were asking, "Why must apples be called 'apples', when oranges are called 'oranges'?" It's a question that isn't coherent enough for a single answer, as it seems to be based on flawed foundational assumptions on the part of the asker, e.g. "Who says you 'must' call apples 'apples'" and "Do you actually think English people named oranges after the color, 'orange'?"
Here's deadmik3's original question/assertion [0]:
> Why is speech the only part of 1A that gets this treatment? You wouldn't say the same thing about religion
I would've thought u/kube-system's response was clear enough (e.g. it's the Civil Rights Act, not the 1A, that protects religion), but apparently it hasn't been. So I genuinely don't know what deadmik3's issue is. Do they think laws (and/or the process of making them) are merely a "semantic" concept? Do they think that religion and speech, being in the "First" amendment, confers to them a special overriding priority (i.e. in the way that being in Amendments 2-27 do not)? And if so, have they considered that the 1A explicitly mentions 3 other freedoms – press, assembly, and petition/lobbying – that, like speech, do not have the protection for religion?
Without knowing the presumptions behind their confusing question, it's hard to answer or otherwise debate it. I mean, the natural rebuttal would be to point out that the CRA's protections for religion is far from clear cut and indisputable – has deadmik3 never heard of the gay wedding cake case, which after 6 years ended in a narrowly defined Supreme Court decision? [1] – which means that similar protections for free speech would be even more contentious and logistically complicated, which is likely a key factor why that legislation doesn't exist/has never passed.
But why get into that if someone believes lawmaking is a semantic designation, rather than an actual process that requires considering how a law (and its enforcement) will actually operate in reality?
We can. We just haven't yet, and it is not clear that it would result in a world that most Americans would prefer to the one we live in. And like religion it would be subject to lots of tension and litigation about the speech of the corporation's owner vs. the speech of the corporation's customer.
When discussing the nuance of legislation and constitutional law, there is no such thing as being too pedantic. The difference between something being enshrined in law, something being protected by the constitution, and something being protected by jurisprudence based on the constitution are really big, important differences.
Clearly at some point someone said "freedom of religion should mean protection from persons and corporations", why can't we say the same about speech?