Timex, the obvious problem with your boycott solution is that plenty of businesses are barely affected by public boycotts.
I gave an example of a country club that openly excludes blacks. They probably wouldn’t care if most people refused to patronize them, it might even help their bottom line. And what if, say, a private equity firm announced that no black would ever become a partner. How do you boycott them? How do you boycott a racist exporting company? If your cable company is openly racist but they are the only provider in town, how effective do you imagine your boycott is going to be? And so on.
You boycott those people who patronize them. You boycott the companies that support them. When crapped came out about O’Reilly and Hannity, folks started yelling at the advertisers that supported them, and it had an effect.
You make patronizing those businesses have a cost, so that the people they DO want to sell to, don’t want to buy.
As it is, country clubs are private clubs. They didn’t become progressively less white because laws forced then to be. (Except in cases where they were ruled public accommodations) they became less racist because even those isolated enclaves were still affected by external views that they were racist or sexist.
Yeah dude, it’s hard. Boycotting buses was hard on the 50s, for folks who had no other transportation, but they did it, and it had an impact.
There’s your problem. Most smart people like you prefer tenable political positions. :)
Can I roll out that old canard about Somali being a libertarian utopia? I bet you never heard that one! In Somalia, bakers can refuse service to whomever they like and it’s up to the free market to protect minorities from bigotry.
It’s obvious who supports Hannity, just watch the advertisements. It’s not so obvious who supports a private equity firm, and they certainly aren’t obligated to tell you. The same is true of lots of companies that don’t deal directly with the public. Do they get free rein to be racist?
You can always track down where that money goes, and who is doing business with them.
But honestly, what do you think you are going to do? Legislate something that makes them pick partners based on who you think they should? Good luck with that.
Fair enough. But to my mind, expecting the free market will protect minority rights doesn’t qualify as “rational pragmatism”. :)
At any rate, it’s nice to follow an honest-to-goodness discussion about rational differences of opinion. We need to pace ourselves for three more years of nattering on agreeably about what a disgrace Trump is.
SCOTUS will make this discussion academic as a raft of “religious liberty” bills pass in red states, challenged in court but deemed constitutional by five (or more) conservative judges for the next thirty plus years. Roe? Gone. Gay marriage? Good-bye. Consumer and environmental protection? Worker rights? Were those in the constitution in 1776? No? How about voting rights? So sorry. And if it is in the constitution then by golly we’ll just read it the way we want anyway.
I’m not that pessimistic, but I do worry about religious freedom cases. This one seems so fraught with risk. They declared that gay partners are entitled to equal protection, but other decisions point to allowing some amount of discrimination in the name of religious freedom. But how can you allow a public business to turn away a gay couple if said they’re entitled to equal protection?
Maybe they’ll just carve out specifically religious institutions. For example, nobody is making Catholic churches allow women to be priests, and I can’t see them forcing churches to officiate gay marriages.
Has this actually happened with the private equity firms you are talking about? The closest example I can find is Wilshire, where the former president is basically throwing a kitchen sink discrimination claim at Wilshire… but given the fact that she was president for a long time, the racial discrimination claim is likely just superfluous and the meat is more likley on the age discrimination case.
If such cases exist with merit, there could be potential for them to be useful.
But the point I’m making isn’t simply that the market will magically do it.
I’m saying that these laws don’t do it. There may be some edge cases where they provide pressure, but overall it’s grassroots legwork that actually change society in a way that makes racism retreat into the shadows.
I feel like what we’ve seen in the past decades is that folks put too much faith in the government to solve these problems, and slacked off on the ground game. And as a result, we’re seeing a resurgence of these kinds of beliefs.
Forcing people to sell cakes they don’t want to, to people who don’t want to buy them, isn’t actually going to improve things. It’s just political theater.
The type of economic influence I’m talking about exerting isn’t some magical faith in the free market. It’s not something which just magically happens. It takes work. But I think it’s likely more effective than legislative action. If you want to declare sexual orientation a protected class, fine. I don’t really care. But it’s not going to solve the problem. Solving the problem of bigotry is a bigger job.
You keep arguing this about some bakery not making a cake and either ignoring or handwaving away real, legitimate concerns of someone unable to get medicine or other basic necessities as “edge cases”. It was only recently that the government had to step in because of pharmacists using their “religious freedom” to deny people Plan B.
You can say that someone should just not give that pharmacy their money but… that’s not always going to be an option, and shouldn’t be a concern for someone who already has other issues to deal with.
In the case we’re talking about here, it’s about a guy making a cake.
For the Storemans case, I don’t mind the ruling (or refusal to hear the case rather), because a pharmacy is already a heavily regulated type of store, that provides a very specific service.
What about a grocer who decides to not sell to you because they’re afraid they’ll catch the gay? Or a tow company that leaves you stranded? I can come up with a ton of examples that aren’t just a pharmacy that it would be really awful if they decided not to serve you because of your orientation or whatever reason their religious freedoms decide on that day. This specific case doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
This would be perfectly agreeable to me. My stance has long been that explicitly religious institutions and organizations should be allowed to practice their religious beliefs privately without interference. If they choose to do so in a way that is against gay people, women, or even racial lines? Confined to that religious group it should not be impeded.
But public businesses and interactions should absolutely not be afforded this accommodation. This means Hobby Lobby can’t block employees from having birth control on their health insurance. This means that bakeries can’t choose not to serve cakes based on race or sexual orientation. And this sure as shit doesn’t mean that an employer can force you to divulge if you are taking birth control, and be able to fire you for it.
This represents my view too.
Honest question, though, if religious “freedom” laws start seeing broad application:
Who defines what constitutes a religion?
Just to be clear, I don’t care if you make laws to protect against discrimination of a protected class of people (as long as we don’t dilute that meaning to extend to literally anyone), but in the cases you mention, I suspect things like boycotts would be more effective.
For instance, with a tow truck, you could lobby AAA to remove his certification, and losing AAA business would hurt him bad. For grocers, I’d do the same kind of thing. Get folks to picket his store for being a bigot. Make him own his bigotry, not just in his dealings with you, but on his sleeve for all of his OTHER customers to deal with. Because when it’s out there in the open like that, I think most folks don’t really want to support it. It’s only when it’s allowed to lie low quietly, that many people tolerate bigotry.
