Thank you for just obliterating your argument since if you’re right that Affirmative Action is some horrible form of racial discrimination then your claim that private businesses don’t discriminate was absolutely asinine since lots of private businesses have Affirmative Action policies.
Do you want me to post about transgender women being arrested even in this day and age under “suspicion of prostitution” or “disturbing the peace” when they’re doing things like, oh, shopping at JC Penneys, or driving to work, or sitting on their own front porch? Even ones who have 100% correct gender markers on their IDs? Because I can introduce you to many of the transgender women I work with who have had just that experience.
Open your eyes a little wider beyond the LGB. We in the T still receive government harassment.
I am reading through this thread for the first time.
I found this to be the point where someone got confused.
The OP did not mention gay rights as one of the comparisons that he found distasteful.
Now I’ll read on to see if this was noted and if it got back on track. Either way, this is where it happened. It’s a lesson for other threads where similar things happen.
The word “gay” doesn’t appear in the original post of the thread, but the OP does refer to “the recent thread about bakers in Colorado”, which would be Judge orders Colorado baker to serve gay couples. The topic was there from the very beginning of the thread.
I’m curious - what’s a “correct” gender marker for a transgender person? You mean correct as in the biological sex of the person, or the gender he or she identifies with?
It’s a weak argument. In order for the government to oppress a group, it requires a 51% majority. That’s possible and it has happened historically but it’s not typical.
But if you remove the government from the picture and allow businesses to set up their own standards, then any business can choose to oppress a group. It’s a lot more likely you’ll find a few hundred bigots than it is you’ll find millions of them.
Most people aren’t bigots. Which is why it’s a good idea to have the government stepping in on this issue. It allows the majority of decent people can tell the bigots to knock their shit off. The only people who get upset are the bigots but that’s okay. Bigots belong in the same class as serial killers and child molesters - people that a normal society should oppress.
So, you are demonstrating, again, my earlier observation that you are pretty much unaware of American society north of the mason-Dixon Line and Ohio River prior to 1964. (Or are you going to claim that red-lining (for example) was a government mandated practice?)
It makes a difference legally if you are in the women’s room/changing room and someone “makes you” and complains, and the manager freaks and calls the cops, who look at your ID and see an “M”. Depending on the cop and depending on the situation, if you do not have legal civil rights protections in your state the results can range from “maybe you better find another place to shop/eat since this place is not cool” to “come downtown because we’re arresting you for ‘disturbing the peace’ or whatever else we think we can apply.”
I’ve even heard of a case where a bar called the cops on a transwoman because she took advantage of a “ladies night” special on well drinks, and they demanded the cops force her to pay the “dude’s rate.”
This is an almost comical layering of unsupported assumption on top of other unsupported assumptions and irrelevances. Why do you think major businesses spend so much money trying to be good corporate citizens? Is it because it demonstrates that they have a quality product? Or is it because people don’t like buying from people they think are arseholes?
Some (circa 1964) folks probably did feel that way, that while they weren’t advocates of racial equality, they wanted the option to, say, serve whites and blacks in the same dining hall, especially if they were in a city with relatively peaceful race relations, but subject to state segregation laws. But, evidently they were greatly outnumbered by those who wanted the government to enforce a racial caste system.
This highlights the important role of the state: both passing and enforcing segregation laws, and passing but not enforcing anti-segregation laws, are a manifestation of state power.
The counter to that would presumably be the argument that separate-but-equal facilities didn’t comprise an abridgement of privileges or unequal protection under the law. But, the Southern power structure couldn’t even be bothered to make the facilities remotely equal; their own cheapness and malice undermined the separate-but-equal argument.
This is based on the mistaken notion that the “state” is some alien thing imposed upon us. The state is us; we are the government. The government is just a tool used by the people to do the things they collectively want to do.
Putting aside the issue of the inequality of the facilities in the real world, there’s still a problem with these facilities being separate. Even if you somehow achieved the ideal and creating two sets of facilities that were genuinely equal, their mere existence is supporting the message that black people need to be separated from white people as if black people were somehow unclean and could contaminate white people by contact. The message of black inferiority is inherent in the separation and that fundamental inequality couldn’t be avoided.
To some degree, unlike a hammer or a car, government is made up of other humans with their own wills.
It’s not alien or imposed on us, nor is it us. It’s an institution, and like all institutions, it serves itself as well as those it’s nominally accountable to. Further, agents of the state aren’t chosen by lottery, and they don’t mirror the demographics or attitudes of the population. Further still, by the nature of the electoral process, representation is unequal: supporters of the guy who won are better represented than the fellow who lost.
The state is us, but imperfectly so; and even to the extent that the state is us, it’s not you, or me.
I agree with that reasoning, but it’s not self-evident by the text of the 14th Amendment, which is all I was addressing. It takes some careful, abstract thought to get there. The fact that the learned minds of the Supreme Court got it wrong at first supports this.