Shadow1980 said:
I don't have time to sift through nearly 500 comments, but I will add my two cents to the discussion.
1. )In an ideal world, maybe it would be best to allow businesses to refuse service to whomever they want for whatever reason they want and rational actors in the free market would sort it out. Of course, in an ideal world nobody would give a shit what race, religion, nationality, or sexual orientation somebody is and thus this whole thing would be a non-issue. But we don't live in an ideal world. What we do live in is a world with nuance, subtleties, and fuzzy boundaries, concepts that are lost on most people, and we also have no shortage of people who are anything but rational.
While ideally the market would deal with this because bigoted businesses could be run out of business, as we've seen with Chick-fil-A there are many who will come out to support these businesses out of political principle. The market often fails to function in a rational manner. Businesses are run by people, and those people don't always have profit as their sole concern. They have political principles and religious beliefs that affect how they act. S. Truett Cathy, founder of Chick-fil-A, forewent making addtional money by keeping Chick-fil-A closed on Sunday for religious reasons. If given the chance, many businesses will turn away people for no good reason other than because the owner doesn't like racial or sexual minorities, and despite losing customers there's no guarantee that the market will correct itself. Those businesses can still thrive. Chick-fil-A still does very well as a business because not enough people care enough about their homophobic stances to really impact their businesses. Social conservatives may go there more often just out of principle, and the vast majority of their customers are so utterly apathetic towards anything that doesn't affect them directly that they'll keep going there because they like the food. Tell me, how many of you boycott businesses whose beliefs don't line up with yours? Hell, you've probably directly supported such businesses simply because you never checked to see what their policies were, what candidates they donated money to, or what the beliefs of their owners were.
So, if market solutions aren't guaranteed to work, then what?
Well, if law is going to be passed, we should ensure that it doesn't impose an undue burden on society. This is where we get into things that might not necessarily have clean-cut answers. We must ask ourselves which is more burdensome: Laws that require businesses to serve anyone irrespective of their race, religion, gender or sexual orientation, or laws that allow businesses to discriminate against customers along those same lines? The answers are probably going to be split down the middle. I personally believe that this "religious freedom" bill is the more burdensome. If you start a business open to the public, one that is accessed by public roads, one that may be subject to taxpayer-funded health inspections, one that exists only because they had to get a government-granted business license, then perhaps there's good reason to think that you forgo any rights to tell gays and blacks to piss off.
By allowing businesses to discriminate, it can potentially cause a snarling mess for people having to find someone, anyone that will serve them. Let's say your car broke down in podunk town in the middle of Indiana while you're on a scenic route trip from St. Louis to New York (so no I-70 travel). There's only one mechanic there, but he is a devout fundamentalist Protestant and he doesn't much like the rainbow flag and HRC stickers you have on the back of your car. He could outright refuse to work on your autmobile, thus causing you to waste additional time and money by hiring an LGBT-friendly tow company to hopefully drag your car to the nearest Wal-mart or wherever that will actually serve you. Or let's say you're a Jewish person living in a small town and the local grocery store (the only one in town) ends up with new management, and the new management doesn't like the kippah you're wearing because he hates Jews and decides that your money is no longer good there. Now you're having to drive 50 extra miles to the next town just to get groceries, and you may end up considering moving altogether, just because state law allowed that new manager to turn your away for being Catholic. And let's not even get into the difficulties of legal discrimination in regards to things like housing and health care, which are usually provided by private entities.
As far as I'm concerned, the right to not have your time and money wasted as you are turned away by business after business trumps the right to not serve any and all customers. Business owners are just as much a part of society as any other individual, and sometimes they may have to obey rules that go against their religious beliefs. There's probably a great many things our tax dollars support that many of us object to on religious grounds, but we still have to pay our taxes even though they might support a war despite your faith possibly being explicitly pacifist, or they might support farm subsidies that go towards raising animals as food even though eating meat might be against your religion. Similarly, a restaurant run by someone who's religion doesn't believe in germ theory for whatever reason still has to conform to health codes. Freedom of religion never entailed the right to go through life without having to do something and/or indirectly support something offensive to your beliefs. You don't want to serve gays? Well, maybe you should have thought about that before starting a business open to the public. Now, I do think that businesses should be able to refuse service to people who are disruptive to their business, and I think a good argument can be made that private clubs should be exempt from having to serve anyone and everyone, but grocery stores, bakeries, restaurants, movie theaters, retail stores, mechanics, hospitals, insurance companies, realtors, apartment owners and so on should not be allowed to discriminate on basis on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
Of course, there's a lot of people who think otherwise and that it's a worse and more undue burden to tell business owners that, yes, they might get gay customers and have to offer them service. But why did they go into business in the first place knowing that at least some of their customers are inevitably going to be gay? On the flip side, if I go into a business I may have no idea what the owner believes because his store doesn't advertise it. Is it worse to force businesses to serve gays even if management doesn't like gays for religious reasons, or is it worse for businesses to be allowed to force potential customers to have to go out of their way, wasting time and money in their process, to look elsewhere for someone that will serve them? That might not be as easy for a government of elected representatives to consistently answer as it would for an individual to answer "What is one plus one" or "What is the atomic weight of cobalt?" Somebody's freedom is going to get violated regardless. I personally choose the customer over the business owner because the customer has more to lose.
|