Should venues deny services to people based on their race, sexual orientation, gender, etc.

reply to post by JuniorDisco


Makes a bit of sense I guess. In the case of a flourist or baker, that are doing custom work, they could always just give them a ridiculous price to get around being forced to do business for a gay wedding, or whatever they object to. If that is the case, it needs to be made known up front, I am sure a lot of people wouldn't bother renting a space or opening up a shop if they knew they have no choice in who or what they are doing business with.

That is how I get out of jobs I don't really want to, give them triple price and hope they aren't dumb and I am not the only estimate they get.

reply to post by dusty1


This is getting tiresome going around in circles. Your points have been refuted, and you have been reduced to claiming not to understand, refusing to respond, and apparently claiming that if you are being sarcastic you don't have to have a point.

The bottom line here is that you have claimed someone doing the business they've chosen in a flower shop, and not being able to exclude and hurt other people, is really the same as being dragged away from your home in chains and whipped until work for free, and then claimed someone else wasn't being intellectually honest.

Your own argument will be sufficient to undermine your views from here on out, but if you'd like to lose a judged match to an ATS Debate Champion, send me a private message.

dusty1


Being forced to do work, that you do not want to do, is slavery.

So when I was 20 and was working part time as a 'service representative' at an insurance company I was in fact a slave? The Standard Life Assurance Company is guilty of a crime against humanity?

Look into the Interstate Commerce Act and you see where it has been used in Civil Rights and shows how the feds got involved in these types of decision. Denying certain people service is claimed to hurt IC.

reply to post by JuniorDisco


I am sure you took that job lol. How is that the same as being forced to do business with someone or something you don't want to? That is the issue, being able to refuse a job you do not want.

reply to post by TKDRL


Same here - I think there's kind of a difference between what we do (even if just at the level of basic politeness) and refusing someone's money for a pint of milk because of how they look. I mean I'd think it pretty weird if a business person gave higher prices to black customers in order to lose their business, but just on a basic level they probably wouldn't feel as grotesquely treated as in the milk example.

TKDRL
reply to post by JuniorDisco

 

I am sure you took that job lol. How is that the same as being forced to do business with someone or something you don't want to? That is the issue, being able to refuse a job you do not want.

As part of the job I had to do loads of things I didn't want to do. In my current job I still do - I hate bookkeeping for example, but I have to do it. It doesn't make me a slave, which is what this ridiculous analogy suggests.

If you run a shop you have to serve black people. It's part of the job.

reply to post by Darth_Prime

You have your beliefs and that is fine, maybe you have never faced discrimination like i have and like many other have

Thank you. It is true that I may have not faced discrimination in the way you have.

I did however lose about $50,000 in a business deal based on my beliefs, I wanted to be ethical and the other individual did not, he also leveraged my own beliefs against me.

Putting your money where your mouth is ain't easy, it almost destroyed me.


I've done work for gay individuals, if they asked my opinions and beliefs I'd give them.

But I respect the right of others to follow their conscience.

reply to post by JuniorDisco


Things like that are different though. You are grabbing something from a shelf, that is clearly marked with a price. When you are doing things like decorative cakes and bouquets for example, it's different. There is no way to be able to clearly mark those prices really. Some are way more fancy than others, some will take no time at all, others will take forever. The flower arrangement I got for my cuz funeral cost almost $300. The people that brought stock boquets probably didn't cost anything near that.

It's more like my flooring business. The more elaborate the job, the more expensive materials get, and damn right I am going to charge more for labour. Curving a border around a round staircase base for example takes at least a day to do, and there is no room for error there. Plus the waste, I will be using at least two times the materials on that one little curve, than I would on a straight wall the same length. I can charge whatever I want for labour, customer can take it and sign the contract, or not.

This is getting tiresome going around in circles. Your points have been refuted, and you have been reduced to claiming not to understand, refusing to respond, and apparently claiming that if you are being sarcastic you don't have to have a point.

reply to post by The Vagabond


Did I just catch you monologuing?

I suppose I am also feeble, and utterly defeated.

You don't have to agree with my assertion that forcing service to another is a form of slavery.

Feel free to respond to any of my other posts on this topic. I have attempted to provoke thought, and you have chosen to be snarky and sarcastic, while exaggerating my position on the issue.

So nobody has any control or personal responsibility over their career path, and that fact would make them slaves if they weren't able to only slave for people they don't hate?

I do not understand your poor run on sentence structure.

Yes, that was exactly the problem with slavery. They chose to come here, they chose what kind of work they would do, they set their own price for doing the work, and then they were miserable because they had to pick cotton for gay people too. No wonder we have overcome prejudice so completely, given our obviously firm grasp on what we did wrong.

You were the one being sarcastic when you were addressing slavery.

The bottom line here is that you have claimed someone doing the business they've chosen in a flower shop, and not being able to exclude and hurt other people, is really the same as being dragged away from your home in chains and whipped until work for free, and then claimed someone else wasn't being intellectually honest.

Not all punishment has to be physical. I know this from personal experience.

Your own argument will be sufficient to undermine your views from here on out, but if you'd like to lose a judged match to an ATS Debate Champion, send me a private message.

Forgive me, if I had only known that I was speaking to an ATS Debate Champion.




I think I found a picture of your last opponent.




Again the business owner should not be forced to provide service. This is a slippery slope, that could lead to other issues.

So much for freedom of choice.

reply to post by JuniorDisco

As part of the job I had to do loads of things I didn't want to do. In my current job I still do - I hate bookkeeping for example, but I have to do it. It doesn't make me a slave, which is what this ridiculous analogy suggests.

So what things were you forced to do that required you to go against your conscience?


What many people in this discussion do not understand is that many small business people have everything they own tied up in their business. Their home or other personal property is collateral so they can operate in business. An employee can choose to call in sick, or to take a vacation. A small business person may not have that luxury.



A small business owner carries a great weight to begin with, some know that and take advantage.

Employees have rights.

Consumers have rights.

What are the rights of the small business person?

The right to go out of business.

If you run a shop you have to serve black people. It's part of the job.

A great man had a dream that people would not be judged by the color of their skin but the content of their character.

Now apparently, you cannot judge the content of ones character without fines and penalties.

but people are being judged by the colour of their skin, and their sexuality, and their religion. It's sad that a law has to be in place to protect people from discrimination but it has to be that way

dusty1
reply to post by darkbake

 

Denial of services.

Choice.


When someone is not allowed to deny their services to another person, what does that make them?

They become a slave.

Slaves are punished when they don't do what their masters tell them.

Masters used their power and the power of the law to punish disobedient slaves.

The same slave you post there was living in a society where everyone around him denied him services using their choices, that is the danger.

He obviously didn't have the service of a good chain cutter or lawyer, for example.

When you allow someone to deny services to someone else based on their beliefs, and those services are a vital part of living in the community, it is going to make it impossible for someone of a certain race, gender, sexual orientation, religion or whatever to live in that community.

This is especially true if the majority, if not all, of the community deny services to that person. If someone who is gay gets married in a state where it is legal, yet is not allowed to buy groceries in a certain town because the discrimination against them is so high, that is a way of circumventing Democracy.

-----

Check out a previous post where I did mention an alternative that would provide some protection to people of "religious" character by being more specific about what kinds of services could go over the line, and how I mentioned that in the case of this being true, a business card of an equal quality venue would have to be offered with assurance that their services would be handled there for it to be ethical.

The more pressing issue, in my opinion, is an issue involving too many businesses in a certain community refusing service to a minority, more than an issue of someone wanting to protect their conscious - it is an issue involving someone wanting to "strike back" at someone who violates their views rather than risking doing something that would make them uncomfortable, in the latter case, I guess I find that somewhat more acceptable?

There is a difference between wanting to have the choice to protect your conscious and wanting to stage a coup against what has already been decided Democratically in your state through a ploy involving of service, and I think a good law would be one that addresses both issues, striking down attempts at denial of service as a tactic to circumvent Democracy, while still supporting people with legitimate personal concerns.

Even so, I would still go so far as to say that sometimes when you run a business providing a service to the community, you have to do something ya don't wanna do.

TKDRL
I draw my personal line at racists, lawyers, bankers and politicians. I will never do business with any of those people, their money is no good in my book. Others are free to draw their own lines. That is my opinion.

I'm seeing some good points in what you are saying, I would be in favor of promoting a movement to create businesses that deny services to politicians, whites, men and other majorities or people with power that were engaging in unethical acts in order to level the playing field -

But the problem is, those businesses would probably be shut down while the ones denying services to married gays or other minorities would remain open.

Not to mention the repercussions when the tides turn, and suddenly the minority becomes the majority, and then you would end up starting one of those blood feud situations.

However, you did manage to change my opinion a bit again. I'm also going to add that your way of dealing with things (by tripling the price for problem clients or whatnot) is a practical one, especially in the current climate, I think.

dusty1

A great man had a dream that people would not be judged by the color of their skin but the content of their character.

Now apparently, you cannot judge the content of ones character without fines and penalties.

Wait, I can't tell, are you trying to say that denying services to someone because they are gay makes you have good character? That doesn't make any sense, not even according to the New Testament. Or the Old Testament, either, which is pretty explicit about leaving judging to God and not man -

I don't even know what religion you are talking about here or what

Even if we look at this as a situation where the gay couple is harming society and should be punished, that isn't happening, the gay couple ins't harming anyone - in fact the shopkeeper is harming society not only by denying services to people in the community, but by not producing a service that could have been taxed and kept the economy going, as well, through making a profit for the business, which could have helped pay for more employees or expansion, especially something like a wedding.

I simply don't see any ethical argument that could be made here unless you were... talking about... something else...

This is so utterly pointless.

If a business refuses you, move on, that's it, it's their loss screw 'em.

Go somewhere else and give them your money and be done with it.

There were what, 80,000 new laws in the USA in 2012??? We don't need any laws taking away businesses rights to serve whoever they want to.

If you live in a tiny community and feel ostracized, MOVE. That's what big cities are for, stop trying to push youself into others' lives who may want to just live life THEIR way, whether they're right or not.

This is such a non-issue it's ridiculous, especially when we have so many serious things going on in the world today.

I think that in the US, you should be allowed to discriminate either as a person or as a business but also caution the consequences of those words. I don't believe people should be allowed to sue over discrimination because it opens up the possibility of discrimination scam lawsuits.

Let the people decide on their own with their own wallet where they want to do business. That is what makes a free market so great, but the regulations and laws to allow discrimination to continue by banning it ruins the free market system.

You have the right to get offended and offend others, but you'll have to deal with the social karma thereafter.

The fear over the issue of gay marriage, is that it is basically, about team killing.

dusty1
reply to post by darkbake

 

Denial of services.

Choice.


When someone is not allowed to deny their services to another person, what does that make them?

They become a slave.

Slaves are punished when they don't do what their masters tell them.

Masters used their power and the power of the law to punish disobedient slaves.

I want to say something else about this post I thought about last night when I was taking a shower. My friend knows people that are involved in the slave trade on the darknet, and that includes over 2,000 cases each year in the U.S. - and those are just the ones that are investigated.

This is an example of capitalism circumventing Democracy, but that doesn't make it ethical, and it certainly doesn't make it legal. Just because capitalism has the power to break the rules because it has money does not make it okay.

It may not seem like the same issue at first, but sure it is - yes, the capitalists want something, they want slaves. Yes, that involves stepping on other people's rights. And yes, they have money so they should be able to get what they want. Correct?

And this is happening today, involving both sex slaves and industrial slaves, and the U.S. is one of the most prevalent markets.

Sure, if capitalists are forced to follow the rules and pay their workers, that makes them slaves to ethical employment. But if capitalists act as you assert, this should not only be a good idea, but essential in some cases

reply to post by TKDRL


Yes, I rather agree. And therefore one has a bit of room to price 'undesirables' out. You and I price racists out, some people will make it too expensive for asian people, say, I think they are idiots, but at least they aren't sitting opposite them at a counter refusing to sell them milk.

My point is that this situations are different for different businesses. That's all.