Yeah, you’re ignore-worthy. Well, thanks for considering the request.
Yes, I get it. Timex makes a ridiculous, outrageous claim, but the problem is my tone. It’s like a parable of our times, isn’t it?
Maybe now the Dems will use the mantra that the reason to vote is to control the SCOTUS. That has been the GOP mantra for years.
Yeah, I could see that. I mean, people have mumbled about it for years, but perhaps it will make it as more of a rallying cry this time.
Timex accuses me that I want to limit civil liberties. He offers no evidence or even an example for that claim. I don’t consider American Express or ATT or oil executives as “limiting the civil liberties of others.”
On CU, unlimited money in politics directly results in corruption. Congress passes laws to curtail that activity, SCOTUS overturns it on some dubious 1st Amendment claim but I want to limit the civil liberties of others? Unlike starry eyed libertarians, I don’t live in a context free world. Scott’s initial response isn’t IMO totally out of bounds given that response. I don’t actually know why I bothered to write a response to Timex’s post. Neither of us is going to convince the other. I don’t care what he thinks I think or what he thinks I want. It’s a free country, he’s entitled to whatever opinion he holds even if it’s kinda bullshit. I’ma just going to let this drop.
But therein lies the issue. You don’t care about a group of individuals, in the form of a corporation, expressing themselves. But that is in fact a limitation of their freedom of expression. I understand that you disagree that their freedom matters in this case.
We’ve encountered this same type of thing when discussing the ability to refuse service to other folks. I value my ability to refuse service and choose who I engage in a business transaction, because that in an important individual liberty. But we’ve had discussions where folks have yelled at me for holding that view (forgive me, I don’t recall if that included you, but I think it may have?), out of fear that it would restrict the liberty of someone else to buy things from me (which I don’t believe is actually a liberty that anyone has). This is why I’ve always been very focused on the importance of differentiating discriminating against protected classes vs. trying to force everyone to do business with everyone.
It’s a comfortable position to be in when you can claim freedom but pretty much know the negative of that freedom won’t actually happen to you.
No, the issue lies here: You make insulting claims about other people that you can’t posisbly support with facts, and then ignore it when people point that out.
Not to mince words, but this is a stupid argument. In the absence of Citizens United, are executives of a corporation constrained from expressing themselves? Why, no! It turns out that they have the exact same ability to express themselves as literally every other person in the country. Indeed, they have more ability to express themselves politically than anyone else, because they have far more money to legally pour into campaigns than does anyone else.
I mean, to be clear, I want to limit civil liberties. That’s large part of why I’m not a Libertarian.
I want more restrictions on gun controls.
I want more limits on what business owners can and can’t do (whether baking cakes or net neutrality).
I want more limits on what can count as NPO’s and the activities those people can engage in.
I want flashing disclaimers on so-called-news shows where people are spreading pure opinion as fact.
I also want to be allowed to punch Nazis, but I realize that’s a pipe dream right now.
Which is why I don’t discount the concerns, and certainly will work to punish places run by bigots by destroying their businesses. But I do not want to have the government limit my ability to express myself through my choice of who to do business with.
For instance, we’ve seen places pass laws that say it’s illegal to boycott Israeli companies or companies that do business with Israel. These laws are, in my opinion, totally unconstitutional in that they infringe on the right to express my political views. Choosing who you do business with is an important right that we have under the constitution.
Have you ever walked into a place of business and the minute you stepped foot in the door you were asked to leave? You didn’t say anything. You didn’t ask for anything, all you did was show up and you were asked to leave based strictly on how you look?
Heh, well yeah, but it was for not having the appropriate attire.
I’m guessing that you are describing being thrown out for the color of your skin? But in that case, what they are doing is illegal.
And I don’t oppose the law preventing that kind of discrimination at all.
Preventing discrimination against a protected group is fine in my mind, and not an infringement on my rights of expression, because discriminating against a person based on their race or gender or age isn’t really expressing any kind of political view. It’s not conveying any kind of meaningful viewpoint, just like screaming “Fire!” in a theater isn’t. Not all speech is protected. In order to be protected, speech generally needs to be conveying some actual expression of a position, and I don’t really have any problem saying that it needs to be saying something more meaningful than “Black people are bad.”
Likewise, I wouldn’t really have any problem with extending protected classes to include sexual orientation, because I think that any discrimination against such things to be very close the same kind of fairly meaningless statement of “gay people are bad.” That being said, I at least understand the counterargument, which is that you could say that such discrimination is based on some speech which is making a statement about the morality of gay sex, which has in fact been something that religious people have condemned for ages. So it perhaps gets more complex. Regardless, I would absolutely work to punish that business economically, through my individual actions to refuse to do business with them.
But that’s part of what makes me so reluctant to let the government dictate that I must do business with everyone, because then it’s going to take away my ability to ostracize nazis and Trump supporters. I want to be able to punish them for their views, by refusing to do business with them or engage them. I want to be able to throw them out of a restaurant.
So I’m not opposed to making very specific, narrow restrictions on things like freedom of expression. I’m just vary wary of making broad, sweeping ones.
Okay. Now prove it. Prove it was skin, or it was gender. Maybe they saw a bumper sticker on my car for some sports team they don’t like (never happens I don’t do sports), or maybe they saw me two years ago and decided hey I didn’t like what she said. at some town hall… had nothing to do with skin.
The general rule should be, if you want to have a public place of business,you get to deal with the public. If you can’t do it, don’t go into business.
I guess it’s fair to say that you guys are using a more expansive definition of civil liberties than how I think of them (which is more along the lines of individual rights not impeding or intruding on others.)
And in answer to @Timex, no, I do not consider corporations as entities that have the same rights as individuals. (I didn’t know in your original post that that was what you were referring to.)
Well, in the case you described, it’s fairly easy to prove, since you didn’t even really get a chance to do anything.
But the fact remains that yes, proving such a case against someone is not trivial in practice.
No, I cannot support this. This is a massive infringement on our freedom to express ourselves.
Owning a business is not like joining the military. You do not give up all of your constitutional rights.
It’s fine for you to disagree with me on this, I fully accept that there are many here who do. That was exactly my point earlier, that there are folks who want to restrict the individual liberties of others, in the name of progressivism. I think such views are shortsighted.
No. You want to give others the right to restrict my liberties. You just don’t see it that way because it doesn’t happen to you.
Strangely enough, the words ‘freedom of association’ don’t appear anywhere in the Constitution. This doesn’t mean there is no right to freedom of association, because of that pesky ninth amendment, but it does mean that ‘freedom of association’ has no more strict Constitutional basis than does ‘freedom from discrimination through denial of association’.
The Constitution does mention ‘freedom of assembly’, but this was conceived as a restriction on the government’s ability to prohibit assembly and association. The framers understood that in order to be politically free, people (well, white males, anyway) had to be free to create political parties, organize, etc, and the ‘freedom of assembly’ clause was intended to prevent the government from curtailing that freedom.
Thus the idea that there is a blanket right to refuse or deny association - in particular, commercial association - is, I think, suspect. And it’s worth noting that the issue comes up only as a means to discriminate. I can’t think of a SCOTUS case where freedom of association was being claimed where it wasn’t offered as a means to permit one party to refuse to associate with another party on the basis of otherness. There may be one, I guess, but I can’t find d it.
That is exactly what the proponents of segregation claimed. Were they right? If not, why not? And how was their argument different than yours?
You don’t have a right to do business with me. You cannot unilaterally force me to associate with you. My rights matter in that case just as much as yours.
Again, in the specific case you mention, I already explicitly stated that I do not disagree. I am fully in favor of legally prohibiting discrimination against members of protected classes.
I’m just not in favor of you limiting my freedom to choose who I do business with. There are innumerable reasons why I could choose not to do business with you, and it would be wrong for the government to say that I must. Such compelled association could have all kinds of negative impacts on my business.
For instance, imagine that I have a restaurant, and a Nazi walks in. If I am forced to serve him, then how are YOU going to feel? We recently had a discussion about how allowing someone you believed to hold those offensive views was harming you by his presence in the forum. If we were to extrapolate that out to the real world, I can only imagine that the impact on you would be even stronger.
I should not be forced to do business with a Nazi, not only because it impacts my freedom of expression, but because it limits my ability to cater to my other customers. Even in a moral vacuum, I should be able to refuse service to the Nazi because his presence in my establishment will drive away other customers.
I have a right to get food. I have a right not to be stranded in the mountains because someone won’t sell me gas. I have a right to buy clothes and not go naked. I have a right to be picked up by a private ambulance.You’re focused on rights, just not the rights of the same person.
To be clear, if I owned a business, I am not going to refuse service to them because they’re a Nazis. How would I even know? They actually have to wear or do something for that… and this is the crux that so many don’t understand. Nazis can look like everyone else, and if I find out they’re a Nazis it’s because they’re telling me they are. If they go pick up some cake I baked that says Happy Birthday Jimmy. I don’t know if a Nazis is going to buy or eat that cake. They have to do something, wear something for that happen. I don’t care. Why would I care. I sold a cake.
Minorities just exist.