mrswdk wrote:Dukasaur wrote:mrswdk wrote:
The reason governments exist is to safeguard their citizens and uphold a stable society. I find it totally bizarre that you (and Duk) are advocating for a government that refuses to do that.
Actually, I would agree with the first sentence. That is the best justification for government.
I don't understand your second sentence at all. Why do you think that letting people deal with (and not deal with) whomever they want would lead to instability?
Because within that you're saying it's okay for people to openly discriminate against others. Being able to buy a cake isn't as serious as being able to get a job or anything like that, but by excluding people from that activity on the basis that they're gay (or black or whatever) you are still sending a message to them (and anyone else who hears about it) that there's something wrong with being gay and that it's okay to exclude people from regular everyday life if they're gay.
Not at all. Nothing prevents you from participating in everyday life. Just because you can't get service from Jill's Pastries doesn't mean you can't get a cake from Mark's Cakes across the street. That's the beauty of a free market -- there's pretty close to an infinite number of options available, including specialty options. A business transaction is a two-way street. Just as you have a right to discriminate and choose whether to deal with Jill or Mark or any of their competitors, Jill and Mark should have the right to discriminate and choose whether or not to deal with you.
mrswdk wrote:The government can wait until the cycle of gay rights protests and counter-protests escalates into confrontations and violence in the streets and then do something about it, or it could just set the tone now and say that the right to freely participate in society takes precedence over the right to be a homophobic douche.
On the contrary, it's
because governments are playing identity politics that the situation escalates into protests and counter-protests. There's no rational reason to go into the store of someone who hates you and demand service,
except to force political confrontation. The path of least resistance, the path of live and let live, is simply to go to the shop across the street where they would LOVE to get your business.
Discrimination is costly. If you won't serve gays or you won't serve Jews or you won't serve Sikhs or you won't serve blacks or you won't serve any group, you're cutting yourself off from a source of business. Over time, businesses that don't discriminate will do better than businesses that do. Prejudice is something that pretty much punishes itself.
The overwhelming majority of businesses do not discriminate. This was true even before they were forced to not discriminate. It simply makes good business sense to judge your employees only by their skills and to judge your customers only by their bank accounts. The small minority of businesses who do discriminate aren't hurting anyone. Jill's Pastries sitting over there in a corner isn't making any trouble for anyone, dealing with her small and exclusive clientele of born-again Baptists.
Everybody knows Metrosexual Mark makes the best cakes in town. The only reason why a gay man would
want to go to Jill's is because he
knows it offends her. He
wants to get in her face and force a confrontation, because he knows there will be unpleasant legal consequences for her. This is not laissez-faire. This is identity politics, and it's a dirty and nasty business.
mrswdk wrote:Also, funnily enough an identical case to this actually came up in the UK recently and the baker in question was
prosecuted and fined. What I'm suggesting isn't that outlandish.
Nobody said it was outlandish. Just wrong. It's the mainstream status quo. People of strong religious beliefs who just want to be left alone are increasingly being attacked (legally) which I believe is what this thread was initially about.
Where I live there's no cake issues that I've heard of, but there is a very serious issue with people that are enrolling in Catholic schools and then suing, claiming that they have a constitutional right to not have religious indoctrination forced on them. Well, yeah, you have that right, but then why did you enroll in a Catholic school? It would seem to me that by signing up for a Catholic (or Protestant, or Jewish, or Buddhist) school, you are giving them permission to religiously indoctrinate you. If you don't want that, there's a perfectly good public school system you can go to. If you hate religion, then enrolling in a religious school and yelling "help, help, I'm being oppressed" is ludicrously self-serving and hypocritical. Shockingly, the courts are buying it. It's no different than a gay couple that deliberately goes to find a cake shop owned by a born-again so they can have a confrontation.
