Comparisons to the Civil Rights movement are overused, incorrect, and insulting.

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Comparisons to the Civil Rights movement are overused, incorrect, and insulting.
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All right ITR so far you haven’t shown comparisons to be overused as you’ve only cited one example.

You haven’t been able to demonstrate to anyone here that the comparisons are* incorrect*.

How about you take a swipe at insulting for us. can you cite anyone that is insulted by the comparisons for us? Specifically the comparison between black civil rights and gay civil rights. I believe anyone insulted by the comparison is probably bigoted towards homosexuals, why should anyone be concerned if some bigot feels insulted?

Hey, we only gave the market a hundred years to work on the problem. Another couple of centuries and it would have gotten around to it.

I support the great majority of the Civil Rights Act. If it were purely my decision, there would be a few small parts where I’d make the reach of it less broad. (And like Rev. King himself, I view the Voting Rights Act as a more important moment in the struggle against racial segregation than the Civil Rights Act.)

I find your comparison to Rev King to be overused, incorrect, and insulting.

I’m willing to bet that Rev. King had sharply different views on these subjects than you do.

Keep in mind, King’s first civil rights struggle was over the issue of black people being denied equal services by a business.

/thread

Depends. Is the husband white, the postman black ? Cause there’ll be some disowning going on right there.

Prior to the Civil Rights movement, for almost all of American history, Blacks faced severe discrimination from the federal government as well as state governments. Instances by the federal Agriculture Dept. alone are sufficient to fill books. Prior to the Civil Rights movement, there was no knowing how a free market would treat black customers, since business people had reason to be constantly afraid of race-based violence both by the government and by mobs with implicit government permission. That sort of situation is not a free market.

Nowadays some people think that giving the same governments more power over business decisions will end racial discrimination, as if the the government isn’t continuing to racially discriminate. Affirmative action is just one example. The Asians who are denied spots in top colleges because they are Asians are not suffering the way Rosa Parks was, obviously, but they are victims of racial discrimination. A business that serves the public, on the other hand, has no motivation to keep Asians out, and substantial motivation to let them in.

It does if the owners don’t want to serve Asians.

I mean, if your idea is that a bigoted owner is going to go “Well, shit, I don’t like Group X, but if I refuse their service I lose money. I shall put my objections to one side, for the sake of the cash”, that’s probably true for some. But it’s demonstrably not true for all - for example, the baker in the OP of the original thread.

People don’t always do what is rationally in their best interest. Racism/homophobia/whichever discriminatory beliefs are inherently irrational in the first place.

Like others in the thread, I find you comparing yourself to Dr. King really pretty funny, given the context of this thread.

But you didn’t address the other part of my post. You acknowledge, I hope, that your use of “civil rights” is not how the Civil Rights Act and other people in the US use the term?

So why is it that we should change to suit you? The rights at issue are civil rights, according to every definition I can find, according to the law of the land, according to the understanding of most educated people, and according to a long history of use.

In starting this thread, you are railing against all of those things, not just someone talking about gay guys and a baker. Even if all of us would agree with you, which I haven’t seen much evidence of, we’re a handful of people on an out of the way message board. We aren’t the American public, Congress, or Colorado’s legislature or judiciary. You go convince all of those people and maybe I’ll think you have a point.

In other words, your assertion that the free market will address racism has absolutely no factual basis. On the other hand, government intervention has proven remarkably effective in creating a more equal society.

So, can you tell me, as a gay man, why I should trust your untried solution to protect my rights, over a tried and true solution that, fifty years later, has yet to manifest any downside?

You realize that your trying to convince me of the inappropriateness of one thing I support, by comparing it to another thing I support, right? How well do you figure that arguments going to work?

Are you referring to the Albany Movement? If so, said segregation in services was mandated by city ordinances.

My favorite Rosa Parks reference is by Terry Rondberg, leader of the World Chiropractic Alliance, who got upset when a patient group placed ads on buses in Rhode Island to raise awareness of chiropractic-induced neck injuries:

*“This is like a hate crime committed against our profession,” said Rondberg. “The WCA won’t stand for it.”
…Rondberg likened the battle to the civil rights movement of the ‘60s.

“Selma, Alabama is where the civil rights movement began. It started with a single bus and the refusal by Rosa Parks to take a seat in the back of that bus,” he told an enthusiastic audience during the WCA Summit in Washington, DC…He added: “If those bus signs aren’t taken down immediately,the WCA is prepared to go to federal court and give them an adjustment they won’t forget! The WCA is ready to take on those allopathic skinheads and make this a national issue and the best-known bus ride since Rosa Parks.”*

The WCA website page on which this inspiring screed appeared has been taken down (out of embarrassment, one hopes). :smiley:

That stupid Dr. King, defining civil rights in such an overused, incorrect, and insulting way.

I was talking about the Montgomery bus boycott.

I presume you are aware that the government required segregation on Montgomery’s busses.

Which actually raises another question. If in the OP’s mind, civil rights are really just about those huge, violent oppressions, why is Rosa Parks a civil rights hero? After all, she was allowed on the bus. No one was beating her up when she followed the rules. Sure, it was an affront to her dignity that she had to sit in the back and had to give up her seat to white people if their section was full, but she had a bus to ride. Why wasn’t that enough? Why did the city have to provide her with anything but the bare minimum of being allowed on the bus? The city didn’t have to provide buses at all, so why did they have to provide some sort of affirming bus experience? If she wanted a better transportation experience, why didn’t she just go buy a car? Why was it up to other people to make sure no one was treating her in a mean way? They did do a boycott, so they could do a boycott. Why did the courts force the bus line into desegregating? If the buses were really being hurt enough by the boycott, they would have desegregated on their own.

The Alabama statutues that required segregation in buses can be read here.

For that matter he also seems to assume that, beyond the specific group being denied business costing the owner money, the righteous anger of the worldwide community would swiftly come down on the offending business like 4chan on a fat chick’s selfie and promptly put it out of business. Somehow. Because that’s the beauty of the moral, strongly ethical invisible hand that would never condone such things as slavery, colonialism, objectification of the individual, exploitations of various kinds and so forth.

Of course, if the *local *community happens to be just as bigoted as the bakery’s owner, and the stunt brings in the business of people who heretofore had deplored the regrettable necessity of havingo share bakery space with Teh Ghey but found out they could avoid that dreadful hassle, then deliberate segregation might just be as profitable as it is fun, principled and Biblically sound.

I think my comparison broke down halfway through, there. But y’all get my point.

Yawn. Did I ever say “civil rights are really just about those huge, violent oppressions”? In any case, I addressed a similar question about Rosa Parks in post #53.