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That's a terrible definition. Cancel Culture has nothing to do with Freedom of Association, and if you want to argue otherwise you should at least go through some high-profile cancellation attempts and show how they are in any way connected to it. When Scott got doxxed and a horde of people tried to get him fired from his clinic and bullied him to the point where he locked himself in a room and had nervous breakdown, was that Freedom of Association? When Meghan Murphy tried to make an event and booked a venue she already worked with before, planned on keeping it secret until the last day as per her own anti-cancellation protocol, but ended up publishing at the insistence of the venue itself, which double pinky-promised they will not cancel her and will not cave to pressure, but did in fact cave to pressure and canceled her, when activists started vandalizing it and harassing the staff - is that like a brunette being passed over for a blonde?
Let's not descend to this level of pathos based arguments, people have nervous breakdowns or kill themselves for all kinds of reasons. It doesn't grant one moral power that one has gotten upset, one's interior emotional state as a result of actions doesn't make those actions right or wrong. They stand or fall on their own merits.
That said, the clinic choosing to fire Scott is clearly the clinic exercising their FoA. They decide they don't want to be associated with Scott, based on the things that people are calling the clinic to tell them about him. Or merely because they would choose not to be associated with someone so controversial. The alternative, to say that the clinic is obligated to retain Scott regardless of what anyone says about him or the amount of controversy he engenders, is obviously to abrogate the clinic's FoA. That's the debate we're having here. The Clinic is free to choose who it wants associated with it; and people at large are free to decide that they will or will not associate with the Clinic based on their choices of who they associate themselves with. It is absurd to say that the Clinic is required to associate with people, and absurd to say that people are forced to associate themselves with the Clinic. But at some point in that process of everyone exercising that FoA, we get a Problem. Maybe we draw the line at people telling the Clinic they won't associate with it, but secrecy and confusion seems like a poor strategy for achieving rational ends, more like to end in superstition than in good outcomes. So I'm trying to draw a different line: we need to limit the freedom for majorities to associate.
I know nothing about Meghan Murphy, so I'm not going to get into a nebulous debate about it.
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