Private company. They are free to cave in to demands from a vocal minority if they so choose. They are free to ban anything remotely non-religious or atheistic, if they so choose.
If you feel so strongl about it, start your own company that will publish and market products in line with your values, get together with like-minded people to start an advocacy group and most importantly, vote with your dollars and encourage others to do the same.
It is easy to cry Free Speech, but hard to take actions to defend and strengthen it.
I'm a pretty staunch civil rights advocate, so I acknowledge that it is hard, but that shouldn't stop me ignoring that Kickstarter's value judgement here has, at least in my opinion, erred on the side of draconian.
As someone who occasionally consults for other political groups and startups, I don't necessarily need to start up a new project to spread my message, IndieGogo already serves the more avant garde fairly well -- but my course of action will be to stop advocating the use of Kickstarter and instead start recommending IndieGogo and its ilk.
For the record, I am not trying to assert that Kickstarter did not have the right to do what they did. Obviously it's their site, their servers, etc., etc.; I just really wish they hadn't chosen this course of action because I feel that they went the wrong way, and I will act accordingly.
But again, even more sad than that is that there are 50,000 young people (at least according to @dosomething) that were so eager to see a project censored.
Nobody is denying Kickstarters rights and I would be the first to defend them if anybody ended up suing them over this, but actions have consequences, even for companies. If they don't cave in to the next offensive project (t-shirt with "I have a gun because I have a small dick") then they will stop being percieved as neutral and will hurt their business with some groups. As a company, they are trying to make as much money as they can, so they should consider the consequences of turning away people, even if they unquestionately have the right to do so.
> Private company. They are free to cave in to demands from a vocal minority if they so choose.
And individuals are free to criticize them for their decision. If they indeed caved to the demands of a vocal subgroup of people, then it is only logical for people that didn't like this decision to voice their own opinions, perhaps inspiring another vocal subgroup: fighting fire with fire.
If you feel so strongl about it, start your own company that will publish and market products in line with your values, get together with like-minded people to start an advocacy group and most importantly, vote with your dollars and encourage others to do the same.
It is easy to cry Free Speech, but hard to take actions to defend and strengthen it.