And he’s asking every minority in the country to leave their futures up to the inherent goodness of mankind, as if it’s never been done before and failed, repeatedly, over the entire history of mankind.
It’s good that there aren’t any more racist businesses any more, since they made it illegal.
It’s a feel of a lot harder to run one successfully. We’ll continue carving out the remaining entrenched forces of evil as we can, but things are a fuckload better now than they were in 1950.
That’s not the discrimination I’m talking about, obviously. If I run a shop and someone who murdered a family member comes in, no law should come down on me for that (and no jury would find against or convict me). Same if a potential customer starts cussing me out or drops trou and takes a dump in the foyer.
But you should have a good reason to refuse to serve someone (if only for the self preservation of your business), and it especially can’t violate civil rights laws, that’s all I’m saying. And it seems to me that the Supreme Court’s finding that anti-gay marriage laws were unconstitutional in the US pretty much makes gay people as much of a protected class as any other.
It gives the discriminated a legal option. It puts the business at risk and heavily discourages that kind of behavior as a result.
As for thinking less of me, I think I can live with that. If I can’t get on a forum and explain to someone what it’s like to walk out the door every single day of my life and know, not guess, but know that several of my fellow human beings believe I am less than they are for no other reason than the color of my skin and say without any uncertainty that I am not willing to spend the rest of my life hearing from others that somehow magically social norms will fix this problem… then so be it. Social norms, boycotting and general disfavor towards racism has done nothing. I first encountered it when I was in school at around 5/6 years old, from another child, and then adults and then store-owners, co-workers and as I get older, it has only gotten worse, not better, but worse.
Trumps election certainly brought them out of the woodwork so at least while it’s getting worse I don’t have so many people telling me, us, anymore it’s just in our head,.Racism is dead, water under the bridge, don’t use the race card, blacks, Mexicans, Asian… we’re all the reason racism exists because we can’t let it go.
I don’t believe that the LGBTQA has the same experiences as minorities, heck even other minorities don’t have the same experience as each other. People off different religions don’t walk in the same shoes either.
It’s clear we need to expand our protected class list. If given the opportunity, people are exclusionary, and they’re excluding groups’ rights now because they’re privileged enough to be able to do so.
Yeah, I think that the reason for this though, is that society generally frowns upon fucking racists now.
There are still places where they are racist. While they may be forced to serve minorities, they don’t hide their hate. But its the fact that the market at large doesn’t want to go to places like that, which make them change.
No, you do not need a good reason to refuse to serve someone. You can’t discriminate based on their status as a protected class, but that is it. That’s the only rule.
And really, if you try to go further, you run into all sorts of problems. You start massively infringing upon the rights of people then. You start eliminating their freedom to decide who they associate with, and by extension, you eliminate their ability to express their beliefs.
Saying that sexual orientation should be a protected class is a suitably narrow statement that I can understand, and which I do not fear will meaningfully restrict the rights of others.
But again, I doubt its efficacy. There are perhaps some very specific cases where it would matter, and certainly from the perspective of government actions, sexual orientation should never be a basis for different treatment.
The cake dick though? If I were gay, I wouldn’t want that guy making me a cake. I wouldn’t want to fund his business, and I wouldn’t want to trust him to do a good job in serving me anyway.
Same for a restaurant. If the owner hates you, you don’t want him handling your food, right? You don’t want to PAY him to spit in your food. Having the law force him to serve you isn’t going to make him LESS bigoted.
Seems like there’s a built-in solution to the cake issue.
From the LA Times Story:
“They said you have to create cakes for same-sex couples, so he removed himself from the market. He chose to stop making wedding cakes,” said Jeremy Tedesco, a lawyer for the Alliance Defending Freedom, who appealed on his behalf."
There you go. Problem solved. If society evolves beyond your “beliefs”, then too bad. Gay marriage is legal. You are now a dinosaur. Oh, well. Same goes for the assholes (and I am sure there was a metric-ton of them) who refused to make cakes for a black couple or a interracial couple.
The Civil Rights Act and local accommodation laws have plenty of ‘outs’ that enable business owners to refuse service to protect their business from problematic customers. You can’t, however, discriminate against a protected class. And we can’t expect those who are refused service to simply shrug their shoulders and try someone else. Their recourse should be the law, not a 1-star Yelp review.
Any further bolstering of this kind of “religious liberty” by the supreme court will have dire implications way beyond wedding cakes. We’re like a half step away from Handmaid’s Tale at this point as it is.
Jesus fucking Christ, Timex.
I don’t care what people think when they’re making a cake, cooking a burger, or dispensing a prescription. I just want them to not be able to discriminate.
Timex, your take is very libertarian, and I can’t remember if that’s how you lean. I can identify with a lot of libertarian thinking in the abstract. Yes, in a perfect world where people are generally nice and mind their own business, letting some idiot put up a “no gays” sign should be fine because they’ll be shunned.
But we live in the real world, where there are enough of those idiots to keep those business humming, especially in many very specific parts of the country.
Lest we forget the lesson of the last election, they are not locked in here with US, we are locked in here with THEM.
Yes, I’m a libertarian.
I get it. But from a totally concrete, practical perspective… Are you, as a gay person, going to get a cake from the guy who hates gays? Are you, as a black person, gong to buy dinner from a guy who hates blacks?
The answer should be yes, if I feel like it.
So are you arguing that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and similar state laws shouldn’t have been passed, because they’re ineffective, supposedly?
I’d argue that, in de-normalizing discrimination based on religion/race/ethnicity/national origin you made it more likely that people who were only going along with the status quo ante out of convention/inertia (which was probably a good portion of the population) were emboldened to support things like boycotts because the law was/is on their side.
But the question is, would you feel like it?
It’s not some kind of rhetorical trap. It’s an honest question, because (despite the fact that as Nesrie points out constantly I am a white man) I’ve encountered places where I wasn’t really welcome. I had no desire to give them money as a result. I found other places which were more deserving of my money. Because I don’t like to support businesses which I find bad.
So, I ask you again, would you choose to patronize such businesses?
I would argue that in many ways, but not all, it was ineffective in combating the type of racism we are talking about here.
I would suggest that other natural changes in society had more of an impact on changing racial perceptions, and that it’s changing folks’ actual beliefs which reduces racism, not laws passed by the government.
Desegregation, to some degree, could be one of the ways it helped, because exposing people to other races helps humanize them, which helps things.
I think there is some merit here, but I still think that grassroots movements have more impact than governmental actions in this type of thing.
If you want to improve this kind of stuff, I believe that thinking the government is going to fix it if you get 51% of the vote is mistaken. I think people need to actually confront this kind of thing in a more concrete, tangible way.
So it’s not that such laws are BAD (unless taken to the degree that some have said, “you have to do business with everyone”), but rather that I don’t think we can depend on them to achieve the goals we desire.
Im not a selfish asshole, so who cares what I would do? I care about other people who do want that cake.
And it’s not always food, you know. Sometimes it’s a prescription, or an adoptable baby.
As a freshman 20 years ago i wrote some whiny paper in some English lit class that political correctness was a bad idea because it didn’t actually change peoples’ minds.
OTOH since then i’ve developed a more “Aristotelian” view of habituation normalizing peoples or lifestyle that formerly were considered socially unacceptable. Political correctness imo accounts for a very large proportion of why young people today are so much less, on the whole, racist, sexist and accepting of LGBTQ persons.
If this is true then there is a horse and cart problem; for a society to become tolerant requires you to enforce or compel toleration. Had tolerance not been compulsory (in a matter of speaking) than it’s likely society at this point would have overall not developed to be as relatively tolerant today. The places that are least tolerant today are likely the places where enforcing that toleration (for whatever reasons) was weak or nonexistent.
I’m not really pointing it out, I asked a question and challenged you to consider your perception of the world. Every statement you’ve made puts you outside the direct discrimination experiences itself.
Not being welcomed is not the same as not being served. Literally it’s not. Boycotting a place that is discriminating against someone, again, you’re responding to someone else’s experience… because when you don’t get get served, when someone refuses you service, you’re not boycotting.
You’re entire approach to the problem has been from a position of privilege. Even your active verbs are from a person looking in. You are actually comparing the idea of walking into a place that you don’t feel welcome in to having a place with a sign that said No Blacks Allowed or White’s Only, a scenario where many were not asked to simply leave, but physically forced out, arrested, beaten or otherwise harmed. If you don’t think that could happen today, overnight, I don’t think you’re paying attention to what is going on in this country.
I do get where he is coming from; i think he’s wrong in this instance, but i do get it. Part of the problem is the example of a Christian baker vs a gay couple - the Christian bakers aren’t going to receive a warm reception from typically minded progressives today.
Imagine instead that the Christian bakers are Palestinians and the couple getting married are either Israelis or ethnically Jewish or both. I suspect the uniformity of opprobrium heaped upon the bakers would be significantly reduced in this case. Or perhaps even more inflammatory (and unlikely), a black owned bakery and a KKK marriage. Twist the personalities enough and plenty of people (i mean people across all social media, not here) who feel horrified by the bakers who in this case happen to be Christian would suddenly be defending them when they were not, and the socio-political context of the transaction has changed. Timex’s points look more plausible in the context of these counter-factual examples, which is probably his point. It’s just that in the real world he is discounting the normalizing effect of permitting discrimination the same way he’s overlooking the positive effects of preventing discrimination.
It’s not the same though. How would I know if someone is the KKK. They chose to wear something right, a hood, a tattoo… they make it known who they are by choice. Something on the cake? That’s not the case for blacks or many minorities. All you do is look at me.There are some idiots out there that can’t recognize biracial individuals for sure but there is nothing I can do to change what I am, no clothes, no perms, nothing. I think this is why there is some conflict between the African American community and the LGBQTA community and other communities. It’s not clothing. It’s not my voice… it’s me. It’s not political stance, or a belief… it’s me.
And to your point, the black baker may not know they are serving a member of the KKK… but the KKK member can certainly see they’re being served by someone who is black.
Of course it matters, because you are a rational person. Of course you don’t want that cake. No one wants that cake. You don’t want to give money to a bigot, and support his business.
That’s why it’s ultimately a somewhat foolish and empty exercise.
You want to force the guy to sell you a cake, that you don’t really have any intention of buying anyway.
The REAL desire is that you want him to not be a bigot. But such a law isn’t going to do that. That’s the problem.
And I said previously that there are certainly cases where it might be more of an issue. Certainly with things like adoption, we’d be talking about the state, and I’ve already stated plainly that I don’t think the government should be able to discriminate against you at all.
But the issue with things like cakes and stuff, is that the law isn’t going to achieve the real desire anyway. It’s not going to reduce bigotry. Hell, in some cases it just provides another rallying point for bigots.