sc94597 said:
I don't really care about the constitution to be honest. Sure the government mandating how people use their property and associate with others is probably "unconstitutional" by the tenth amendment, but it's not like it mattered with any of their other intrusions on property rights and rights to liberty (in this case to freely associate.) The constitution itself was a generally illiberal document that was designed to create a centralized state. Anything liberal (when I say liberal I mean in the classical sense) in it, is only there as a compromise with the opposition at the time (anti-federalists.) The Declaration of Independence on the other hand is a fantastic document, and it would be nice if more Americans put an emphasis on the principles pre-faced in that. My opposition to the civil rights act is based on something more fundamental than the U.S constitution, a principle that we all should have control over our own lives and our own property, a principle based on self-ownership. With that, we should also accept full responsibility for our actions, as our actions are entirely ours to be made. As for this law, I see it as another reaction to a prior action. It is a legal precedent that gay couples can sue, say a bakery, for not producing a cake for their wedding and consequently the reaction is that people who don't agree with this push call on their representative in their state house to allow discrimination against homosexuals, out of mostly - fear and anger. If people just associated with those who were accepting of them then there wouldn't be a problem. There are more than 315 million Americans, and the year is 2015. There are dozens of millions of people with whom we can interact with voluntarily without forcing people who don't want to like us for whichever pre-determined trait we might have. |
I understanding what you are saying and agree, you can't legislate for people to be courteous and nice to those that they don't, for whatever reason, want to interact with.
I think the problem with this is assuming that those on the receiving end will always have a choice in this matter. This may be manageable to an extent in our social lives but we have much less control of this both in the workplace and in places of commerce. This is particularly true of people living in small towns, where for example, there might only be one bakery.
Simply speaking I think there is always risk in providing legislative support for predjudice. Even though I believe we should stop short of forcing commerce, I think there has to be some protection for minorities in these instances. One would hope that in most situations common sense and market forces would prevail, with people avoiding service in establishments where they are likely to be unwelcome, and subsequent adverse commercial/financial impact for those businesses that openly support bigotry.
