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"Right to Discriminate" Bill

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Yep

The bill is designed to allow businesses to reject service to any customer based on the owners' religious beliefs and use these religious beliefs as protection in a discrimination lawsuit. Arizona State Senator Steve Yarbrough, one of the bill's sponsors, claimed the push for the bill was prompted by a New Mexico case in which the state Supreme Court allowed a gay couple to sue a wedding photographer for refusing to take their wedding pictures.

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If a business owner wants to hire an incompetent white guy instead of a competent black guy, why should we try to save him from his own stupidity?

Let them discriminate. They'll simply go out of business sooner, as they should.

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This was categorically ruled against in the UK after we had a few "scandals" to do with Christians not letting gays stay at their B&Bs and a Muslim deciding that even selling people alcohol was against her religion... Despite working in a shop where selling alcohol was very much part of the job and Islam having no problem with people handling glass bottles or even alcohol itself (they're just not allowed to drink it themselves, presumably because a religion started in a desert would have a dim view of people dehydrating themselves and it's none-too-sensible to lose control of yourself in a harsh or dangerous environment).

I think religious establishments are still allowed to draw their own lines and I'm fairly certain people working in diverse companies can be moved away from bits that their personal delusions tell them are prohibited by their own request, which presumably means that they're going to be viewed as awkward to employ in certain sectors and quietly discriminated against by pragmatic employers.

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Might be about time I start looking for a new planet to live on.

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Call me crazy but I think businesses should have the right to refuse to serve anyone or hire anyone for whatever reason. As AndrewB points out, competitiveness means the money and talent will go to somebody else, somebody more in line with your principles. Why be mad about that?

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Phobus said:

presumably because a religion started in a desert would have a dim view of people dehydrating themselves and it's none-too-sensible to lose control of yourself in a harsh or dangerous environment

Nothing like that. Wine flowed freely in the area -- it's a trading hub between three continents after all -- and nobody ever thought drinking alcohol was a bad idea "because desert". Instead, the prohibition against alcohol in Islam is a prohibition against drunkenness, as allegedly Mohamed was shocked by excess of debauchery. In a typical display of religious oneupmanship, this became a prohibition against any alcohol consumption (even in small doses that do not cause drunkenness) and then a prohibition against everything fermented (too bad for black tea).
http://www.free-minds.org/alcohol-forbidden-islam

Mohamed himself drank alcohol regularly, as everybody else did. But what Mohamed did is only good when it's used to justify marrying 9-year-old girls to their uncles. Whenever it could be used to relax hardline stances, then it should be conveniently ignored.

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Phml said:

Call me crazy but I think businesses should have the right to refuse to serve anyone or hire anyone for whatever reason. As AndrewB points out, competitiveness means the money and talent will go to somebody else, somebody more in line with your principles. Why be mad about that?

I agree. A private business owner should have the right to deny whoever they want for whatever reason. Forcing anyone do anything rarely fixes the problem at hand.

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While I'd like to say I agree with andrewb, I think a lot of smaller businesses would jeopardize themselves by having the freedom to shout their bigotry, but a lot of the bigger more established businesses would be able to take the hit to get their points across. There are a lot of businesses that even if you fucking hate them, still manage to get your money some way or another.

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While I don't support racism I feel that companies should be able to hire anyone whom they want to for whatever reason. Nonsense like affirmative action have made me sick of the equality struggle.

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Phml said:

Call me crazy but I think businesses should have the right to refuse to serve anyone or hire anyone for whatever reason. As AndrewB points out, competitiveness means the money and talent will go to somebody else, somebody more in line with your principles. Why be mad about that?

So you've spent half an hour wandering around a supermarket and go to pay for your shopping cart full of groceries only to find they're not going to serve you because you're wearing the colour purple? And you're not going to complain about that at all? The world can't function like that.

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DooMAD said:

So you've spent half an hour wandering around a supermarket and go to pay for your shopping cart full of groceries only to find they're not going to serve you because you're wearing the colour purple? And you're not going to complain about that at all? The world doesn't work like that.


Uhm, yes it does. You just go to another store.

Not to mention that if a store were to do something like that nobody would go there anyways. I don't think people seem to understand that peoples views have changed. Laws are not needed anymore in order to prevent racism. Recently a store owner in my country put a sign on his shop window where he said he would not serve any jews, and then people stopped buying his stuff. These kinds of anti-racism laws are not needed.

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*shrug* I got booted out of my fair share of stores when I was young, just for looking a certain way and dressing a certain way. It certainly pissed me off, but I never considered bitching to somebody else about it, let alone trying to force my views on everyone else. I'll give you at the time it may have had more to do with a culturally ingrained distaste of snitching and perceived "unmanly" image of complaining rather than with strong moral values...

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I sympathize with businesses being free to refuse service and/or hire whoever they choose, but to me, this is just so friggin' stupid that I can't believe any business owner would support it. It's like driving without a seatbelt - yeah, in the purely abstract sense, I understand why someone might oppose seatbelt laws, but on the other hand, it's kinda hard to ignore the fact that driving without a seat belt on is not such a smart idea. And due to this, I have a hard time saying, "Oh yeah, I think it'd be a great idea to do away with this law."

I also wonder if this would potentially open the door to lawsuits. I mean, what if someone is wrongly accused of being gay even though they're not? A malicious coworker might start a rumor or something. Maybe you just don't dress right, or whatever. Couldn't you then sue for slander?

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hardcore_gamer said:

Uhm, yes it does. You just go to another store.

Not to mention that if a store were to do something like that nobody would go there anyways. I don't think people seem to understand that peoples views have changed. Laws are not needed anymore in order to prevent racism. Recently a store owner in my country put a sign on his shop window where he said he would not serve any jews, and then people stopped buying his stuff. These kinds of anti-racism laws are not needed.


In that case I hope you get refused service in every store on the grounds that they don't serve people who haven't thought their argument through to conclusion. Bigotry breeds more bigotry, discrimination breeds more discrimination. If you don't keep that shit in check, you will get marginalised sub-cultures and a two-tier society. If laws hadn't been introduced to stop discrimination, we'd still have things like apartheid in every country, but that's mostly stamped out now because it's illegal.

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hardcore_gamer said:

Uhm, yes it does. You just go to another store.

What if you're in a small town and there's no other store?

And store, schmore. There's other types of businesses. What if you want to go to the swimming pool and you can't because it's Muslim-women-only hour? There typically aren't five hundred different swimming pools in the same city.

What if the buses and subways decide you aren't allowed onboard, what do you do, use the public transportation of a different city instead?

"Use the competition" is not a miracle solution. In many cases, there are no competition because the infrastructure wouldn't support it (small town situation, either because the local customer base only allows one provider to thrive) or because antitrust watchdogs were sleeping at the wheel and the competition had a clear winner who ate everybody else.

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Will this apply to hospitals as well? Sorry sir, but we don't save mooslim lives here. Or atheists, or anyone we might have reservations about.

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hardcore_gamer said:

Not to mention that if a store were to do something like that nobody would go there anyways. I don't think people seem to understand that peoples views have changed. Laws are not needed anymore in order to prevent racism.


I'll never understand just worlders. You're smart enough to gaze into the past and see how things were, how the world and the people in it worked and can say that a thing that happened was a stupid idea and are glad that it's not around anymore. But then you fail to realize that the reason times have changed and the reason our views are different now is quite literally because certain laws and rules and regulation were put into place to begin with in order to stop the bad practices from continuing.


Uhm, yes it does. You just go to another store.

Yeah, and what if similar discriminatory policies are endemic to your community or region and not relegated to a single place of business?

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What Quast and Gez said. These things do happen all the time.

This fits within the broader debate about regulating businesses. If we kept letting them do whatever they want we'd have a world that looked more like the pre-nuke Fallout-verse than anything resembling modern society - ie. no worker safety, wage slaves, little competition, killer-robot security, chemical dump playgrounds, etc. Oh, and no wheelchair ramps. Nobody ever wants to build those.

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Quast said:
Yeah, and what if similar discriminatory policies are endemic to your community or region and not relegated to a single place of business? [/B]

If a community filled with economically incompetent majorities use torches and pitchforks to chase out economically competent minorities, the community would eventually go bankrupt, and it would become a cesspool of poverty, crime, and pollution. This has happened before. If you're one of the competent ones, why would you want to live in such a shitty and intolerant community?

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Some opinions here are truly disturbing.

If you get to the bottom of this nonsense it boils down to one thing alone:

Give religious fundamentalists the right to dictate their terms to others. Just what perfectly fits into the Republican agenda.

Some parts of the USA are truly on their way back into the stone age.

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Public services are not businesses. Letting businesses cherrypick customers is not the same as letting businesses dump toxic waste in your backyard. Do you guys have so few actual arguments to support your point you have to head right away to straw men? Speaks volumes of the strength of that position.

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AndrewB said:

If a community filled with economically incompetent majorities use torches and pitchforks to chase out economically competent minorities, the community would eventually go bankrupt, and it would become a cesspool of poverty, crime, and pollution. This has happened before. If you're one of the competent ones, why would you want to live in such a shitty and intolerant community?

Are you kidding me? While that has indeed happened it is far and away an extreme exception to the rule. More often it is the economically disadvantaged that are discriminated against.

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"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

Somehow I think legislators think that it's okay to ignore the establishment clause because they're making a law that condones the "free exercise" of religion. It doesn't work like that. This bill will get shot down by the supreme court.

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Phml said:

Public services are not businesses. Letting businesses cherrypick customers is not the same as letting businesses dump toxic waste in your backyard. Do you guys have so few actual arguments to support your point you have to head right away to straw men? Speaks volumes of the strength of that position.

What about private hospitals, then? Fuck socialized healthcare anyways, haha! We'll have a bouncer at the door, so the actual doctors don't get all conflicted about Hippocratic Oath. Their patients will already be filtered to just true Christians, so no harm done except those atheists not making it to the next hospital, LOL!

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Quast said:

More often it is the economically disadvantaged that are discriminated against.

In what sense? Being unable to patronize the establishments? Being economically disadvantaged tends to have that effect no matter who you are or where you live.

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You know, the other thing that bothers me here is, since when did religious freedom become "Freedom to tell others what to do?" It seems any time the argument of religious freedom is brought up anymore, it's always in the context of, "Well what those people are doing goes against my religion and my thus my freedom of religion is being violated." I feel like freedom of religion should really stop at telling other people what to do. Otherwise, how is it freedom of religion at all? I know my position isn't exactly supported by the law, but I feel it's in the spirit of the intent of the law.

People need to recognize that their religious freedom hinges upon the notion that no one else can force their views on you. If you insist on forcing your views on others, you are only threatening your own freedom in the long run. For this whole thing to work out, people need to be able to grow up and say, "Hey, they've got different beliefs than me, but that's alright." Otherwise, how long before someone else comes along and says, "Hey, you were able to force your beliefs on others, why can't I force my beliefs on you?"

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