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ofrm1 on 27 March 2015
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sc94597 said:
ofrm1 said:

It has nothing to do with what is harsher on the bigots. It has to do with protecting the rights of minorities in a liberal society.

If Chick Fil A at some point decided to refuse service to gays and there was no law preventing them from doing so, they would not fold. There would be a mass of people that would support the resturaunt out of principle. The same goes with minorities.

This is why principles that guide one's action must be universal principles, like the categorical imperative. Otherwise there will be cases where your principles cannot apply, so you must abandon them, which defeats the purpose of having principles if you abandon them at the drop of a hat.

There are no laws in many states preventing Chic Fil A from not providing service to gay people, yet they still provide services to gay people in those states. Why? Because they know if they didn't they'd lose a lot of revenue and their competitors would gain market power. A company doesn't have to fold for its owner/owners to be hurt by poor choices. Large companies like Chic Fil A aren't in the business of losing customers or forcing people from buying their food. They are in the business to make money and gain market power. Discrimination was only so debilitating in the southern states because the southern states forced everyone to do it, making it cheaper and less harmful for the people who wanted to do it and much more harmful for those who didn't want to do it.

If their motive was to focus on maximizing profit, the CEO wouldn't have said anything on the issue as making statements like that is a big risk financially speaking. So this libertarian notion that personal beliefs do not affect a business's decisions and that the free market will weed out bigots is just false.

Also, this notion that discrimination in the south was only a result of de jure segregation is also patently false. De Facto discrimination still occurs today. The video I linked mentions Bob Jones University and how it wasn't until 2000 that they finally dropped their prohibition on interracial dating. Clearly the free market sucked at coercing them out of the market. You know why? Because there's still a ton of bigoted people in America that will support these bigoted businesses, and unless the government uses coercive force to stop them, those bigoted businesses will stay in business.

I've had this exact discussion dozens of times and I'm tired of having to argue against something that is really only an idealistic, academic discussion and has no effect on the real world. The real legal system places a priority on people's right to equal treatment under the law over a person's right to discriminate. That's just the fact of the matter. Arguing whether that ought to be the case really doesn't matter because it's not going to change a thing, and anyone who thinks pragmatically rather than on principle comes to the conclusion that it should. Since no one ever changes their mind on this issue, there's really no point in continuing.