Well, sort of - if you don't want to buy insurance for religious or personal reasons, there's still that "tax" that will kick you in the ass to penalize you for *not* buying something. But I digress.
The interesting thing is, this law isn't the important thing. Indiana already had an endearingly large lack of anti-discrimination laws present, and thus the law is more symbolic than anything else.
So of course, twitter must therefore symbolically shit its pants - or embroiled itself in righteous indignation, depending on the color of the pants of the person you ask.
The law didn't say anything about the kind of discrimination which a business could commit on religious grounds, nor did it specify any religions. However, many people seemed to think that a stunning lack of any specific mention whatsoever implicitly means that the law is condoning Christian businesses denying business to LGBT folk.
And of course at this point in the conversation the Colorado bakery comes up. It always does. Let me ask a quick question: this one story hit the news like a thunderclap, but where were the followup stories revealing hundreds of cases of gay individuals being denied baked goods on account of their sexual activity?
If the answer can fit on one hand out of a nation of over 300 million people, I'm going to guess that discrimination isn't really a problem right now - at least as far as anti-gay discrimination is concerned.
You see, it's not the whole phrase that the enraged care about, it's only that first half: "anti-gay." The other word is fine to them, depending on the usage.
Is the customer an asshole? "Oh sure, discriminate against him, that's fine."
Is the customer drunk? "Oh yeah, kick him out!"
Is the customer a formerly convicted pedophile? "I'd beat him up myself!"
Is the customer gay? "No sorry, they're a protected class, and not to be trifled with."
And that is in fact the phrase I've come across: "protected class." Gays are special, drunks are not.
So then, what do you do when a drunk gay man walks into a store and the owner throws him out?
This is the second, important part, for those of you who find Indiana's law to be atrocious.
If you take offense, then you truly believe that gays are a special class - not just above drunks, but above the public in general. This is classism. The alternative is that you believe businesses should never discriminate ever, in which case God help you if a gunman ever enters your minimart.
If you don't take offense, then you've got a separate problem. If you're okay with a store owner throwing out a drunken gay man because he's drunk, and not because he's gay, then the source of your anger has nothing to do with his act of discrimination, but the thoughts that were in his head before he chose to commit that action.
In other words, bigotry is officially a state-enforced thought crime in Colorado. And you're cheering it on only because you don't like the particular thoughts in question.
This of course is an inevitable result; the thought crime is only a step away from a hate crime.
For instance, a hate crime like racially-driven murder, wherein certain parts of society take umbrage that, not only was the murderer filled with murderous contempt during the time of the murder, but that there were also some bigoted thoughts going on as well. This of course makes the murder extra scary - though I imagine to the man who's been murdered, it doesn't make a lick of difference.
As I said before, the REAL lesson here is to be taken not from the words of the law, nor from its passing, but rather from the reaction that it caused.
Because we now know that there is a sizeable portion of the society who would rather accept the concept of thought crimes into law and who would rather give up freedoms of commerce rather than allow a lesbian couple to have a sad face and find another bakery to bake their cake.
Nearing the end of this post, I'll address what seems to be the most coherent argument in favor of anti-discrimination laws. This was posted as a comment by TJ, aka "The Amazing Atheist" in the comments section of his youtube video on the subject, found here.
...when you open a business, you are serving the community. To discriminate against a particular segment of society undermines all of commerce and it relegates people in the community to second class citizen status. I think the freedom of the consumers far outweigh the freedom of business owners. All businesses must operate within the laws of the society they exist within (except for black markets, of course). Laws against discrimination are just one of many requirements businesses should be expected to cooperate with for the sake of societal cohesion. If they do not wish to comply, I do not wish for them to be in business.
It is also patently false to assert that discrimination against a particular sect undermines general commerce - the only commerce it affects is that of the business owner. Moreover, to assert that denial of service by one business constitutes a relegation to second class citizen is preposterous, and is a logical conflation. Moreover, I can guarantee that you yourself, if you owned a building that you allowed the public to access, would choose to remove "particular segments" of society; several of those segments have already been named, but I think we can comfortably expand the list to include rapists, extremist Muslims, and members of the Westboro Baptist Church.
While it is true that laws are legally binding, the mere existence of a law does not ipso facto justify its existence, and businesses have no reason to believe that laws against discrimination bring societal cohesion, since well over half of the states have existed just fine without them (as you yourself pointed out). Positive societal change has always come despite the government, rather than at the hands of it. I'll remind you what happened the last time the government tried to provide "social cohesion" - the death tolls reigned in the tens of millions.
Of course, all this dialogue ignores an incredibly pertinent question to ask: if a business owner decides to deny business to a gay couple immediately after learning that they're gay, but refuses to state his reason...
How far are you willing to go to try to read the business owner's mind and prove that he was thinking anti-gay things before you realize just how willing you are to punish thought crimes?
Personally, if I saw that lesbian couple from the bakery fiasco enter my shop, I'd be inclined to deny them service - not because they're lesbians, but because they're the type of people who would be okay with the destruction of someone's life work simply because that person was brave enough to stand for what they believe in, and that thing happened to be the "wrong" thing.
Destruction of someone's life based on religious opinion is not only despicable, but quite possibly evil. And that lesbian couple can go fuck themselves.
...in Christianly love, of course.
No comments:
Post a Comment