While reading another website I came across this article about a gay couple who was turned away from a Bed & Breakfast in the UK because the proprietor is a Christian who did not want two men sleeping together.
As a fairly liberal-minded person, I think the woman is short-sighted and bigoted and I am personally disgusted by her actions and attitude however as a Libertarian-minded person I wonder why a person cannot run a business the way that they want, especially when it is a business that even includes their own personal residence as it is in this case.
At the end of the day, I would prefer be on the side of the gay couple than the inn keeper but I want to be able to articulate why the priviledges for some members of society (it’s not a right to stay at a hotel) should supercede the rights of business owners to operate their businesses in a manner they see fit, no matter how discriminatory that might be to some segments of the population.
I understand why public institutions or publicly-owned business might have different standards but am at a loss on how to reconcile my conflicting feelings for privately-owned businesses…
As another sticky wicket that just occured to me, what if in America a church wanted to discriminate and not allow people in based on gender, race or sexual orientation? The government is specifically obligated to stay out of church affairs and I personally would not want to tell a church what they can and cannot do as a non-member but again, this is repulsive to me but I cannot in good conscience give the government permission (or even an obligation) to step in and quash such a thing when I want them to stay out of the churches (and vice versa) in almost all other matters.
When someone will get their rights trampled in some manner or another, how can I fairly determine which group gets the shaft?
Religious groups in the U.S. tend (wrongly IMHO) to be specifically exempted from most anti-discrimination legislation.
I’ve got some sympathy for the idea that private people should be free to discriminate, but the way the law stands at the moment is a mish mash of compromises.
If we are going to use federal law to prevent discrimination, which we do in places of public accomodation such as hotels and restaurants, then it strikes me as potentially in violation of the First Amendment to grant religious institutions exemptions from such laws. But then again, and this is a disclaimer I always make in these threads, I think tax exemptions for religious institutions also runs against the true meaning of the First Amendment. Unfortunately the Court disagrees with me on that one.
If you’re a libertarian, I assume you would side with the business owner in this case.
If you want to craft a rule that allows you to side with the couple, then the rule might be something like: a business cannot discriminate against a class of people unless that discrimination has a valid or necessary business purpose. This is somewhat the way it works in California.
So, in your example, there’s probably not a business purpose any more in discriminating against gay people as a class. I suppose if you could show that you are going to lose a huge amount of business if you let a gay couple stay at your hotel, then you might have an argument under this rule. But in modern day England, I don’t think that argument works.
Now, as to why you should craft this rule… all economic regulation is at the end of the day a value judgment about how markets should be structured. Even the most die-hard libertarian provides some regulatory structure to the market. So, the question ultimately turns out to be where you want the competition in the market to center around. If you think the market should compete on discrimination, you allow discrimination. If you don’t think it should, you don’t allow it.
It’s not a sticky wicket at all. A church is free to deny anyone entry for any reason. This doesn’t necessarily apply to church owned businesses or property that’s generally open to the public though.
The business probably needs some kind of permit or license to operate within that city. As long as this is so, I don’t have a problem attaching non-discrimination as a requirement for granting the business license.
Regarding religions, I feel they should be allowed to discriminate to their hearts content, as long as they’re stripped of any kind of governmental assistance or tax exemptions. No more special status or treatment.
I’m a gay libertarian, and I think that a private business owner should have the right to be as stupid and self-destructively discriminatory as s/he wants to be, as long as I am completely free to withhold my custom and support from that business.
In other words, in a free market I do not have a right to stay at your B&B, even if you are operating it as a business open to the public. To me, this is no different from the signs that say “No shoes, no shirt, no service”. The business owner has a right to maintain standards for their customers, even if some of those standards are moronic or hurtful.
In a truly free market, all they would be doing is reducing the pool of possible customers, and thereby increasing their chances of going out of business. If the business is not getting any public assistance of any kind (including tax breaks), then they should be free to go to heck in their own way.
So in your example, and assuming a free market, no-one’s rights are being trampled if the inn owner is allowed to turn away customers for any weird-ass reason they like. I defend this distasteful inn-owners rights for the same reason I defend a neo-Nazi’s right to free speech - it is easy to defend someone’s rights when you like them and their positions, but it is the right thing to do to defend the rights of people you can’t stand, as long as they are in the right in the particular point at issue.
Of course, the UK does not have truly free markets (and neither do we in the US), and so to the extent that this business benefits from tax-supported public/government largesse, they have a responsibility to serve all of the public, without discrimination.
Curse that tax-supported public/government largesse, anyway! It’s such a double-edged sword.
Roddy
But you won’t necessarily be able to. Not if prejudice against you is prevalent in the business community, and there simply aren’t any available businesses that will cater to you. Or the ones that do will screw you over, presenting you with higher prices and worse service and general contempt because they know you have no alternatives.
As libertarians typically do, you are ignoring the fact that the government is not the only source of power and coercion.
Yeah, that’s a problem. I remember watching TV where a black man entered a whites-only restaurant in the segregated south and he was begging to buy food for his starving family and the woman wouldn’t sell it to him. He made the mistake of touching her arm while he was pleading. Even though he was immediately remorseful and apologized, a bunch of diners who saw the whole thing wound up lynching him that evening.
That’s not much of a defense - it’s kind of a slippery slope - however I think I did come up with a way to defend antidiscrimination laws…
The gay couple doesn’t have a “right” to stay at a bed & breakfast however I don’t know if the woman has a “right” to own a business. And I think that if you did ascribe an inalienable right to business ownership (say, the pursuit of happiness) it’s no less tenuous to say that the discriminated person is also being denied those same rights. Who cares if that denial is not from the government?
If nobody’s “rights” are being infringed then any laws made that regulate this are fine with me because the laws need to be good for the society and there are a million practical and philosophical examples that can demonstrate that a diverse society that is not antagonistic to such things as race, gender or secual orientation is far better off than one without diversity and with antagonism and therefore laws that protect this diversity are for the good of the community.
I also think that any time you take up a job (and especially if you are taking an ownership role) where you deal with the public, you have a responsibility in how you deal with the public that should conform with community standards. With rights come responsibilities (at least that’s what I learned in Boy Scouts) - or would a staunch Libertarian disagree with even that basic premise?
(I am not a staunch Libertarian, but I lean that way on many issues - though apparently not this one.)
I read the same story on the BBC and had pretty much the same reaction as you- I don’t agree with the proprietor but it’s her business run out of her house and part of me thinks that if she wants to have a “No Gays” policy then she should be able to.
The problem is, if you let her have a “No Gays” policy then you’ve got to let every accommodation outlet have a “No Gays” policy, and that’s really not cricket because that would mean there would be entire towns and villages that gay people wouldn’t be able to stay in (unless they had a friend there).
More worringly, if it’s acceptable to have “No Gays”, then some businesses might start to want to have “No Polish” policies in place for “Business reasons” or whatever…
I’m also in agreement with the idea that the proprietors in this case should be able to do what they like with their business.
I suppose the simple answer to the “What if this resulted in nation-wide discrimination?” is that there would then be a considerable market for businesses which did cater to the discriminated-against group. But I don’t think it’d always work out in practice. Really, i’m not sure there is a “right” answer to this question; whatever you end up deciding, someone’s rights are going to be trampled on, to some extent.
Black traveling in the South used to have to rely on networks of friends to have places to sleep and stay. In the 50s, integrated groups–the University of Michigan concert band is an example I’m aware of–could not tour the South because integrated accommodations were unavailable. Even where this was not a matter of law, it would not make sense for a white business owner to break segregation; whites would boycott. In the U.S., at least, civil rights laws were a remedy for discrimination at a level that made a joke of the rights of large chunks of the population–not just blacks, as the business owners’ powers to run things as they might personally chose worked only for segregationists.
One might argue that, with less extreme discrimination, the balance should favor the business owner’s right to do as he or she pleases. I wonder what the U.S. would look like if civil rights laws went away. Maybe it would work now–I’m not sure.
Civil rights laws protecting LGBT people may seem less important–I guess because such people have a better chance of concealing their minority status. Again, I’m unsure here–I suspect the concealment is pretty oppressive.
Were discriminatory contracts still enforceable in the U.S., large parts of the town I live in would have been off-limits for housing for my husband (and me if I intended to live with him)–the old discriminatory covenants are in thousands of deeds around here. Likely more of them would have been created, so that my neighborhood, build in the 70s would be barred to us. Prejudices still ran pretty thick then, and probably still run strong enough that they’d still be being added. Maybe not to bar us (my husband’s jewish. which no one much cares about now) but probably enough that black residents would be barred.
I’m sympathetic to individual rights arguments in general, but when protection of commercial rights would result in marginalization for others, real freedom suffers.
The question’s pretty much been answered – not only are the personal and emotional depredations of being victimized by discrimination horrible, there are economic tragedies as well. Letting businesses who purport to be open to the public discriminate against classes of people based on prejudice forecloses in wholesale ways those victims’ ability to earn a living, get an education, travel, get access to social services and health care, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum – that is, to participate in the economic aspects of society on a level playing field. And that not only unfairly makes their lives harder, it creates a cycle such that every year it’s harder to break free of the economic ghetto than it was before – and this is visited on the children as well. (I read somewhere recently that over a gay person’s lifetime, merely being gay costs him a half-million dollars in lost economic opportunities.) Such discrimination deserves our scorn because it is immoral and pigheaded. But it is the unavoidable, ever-compounding economic damage it works on us all (even those not directly victimized) that allows the law to prevent it.