That was already inherent in the separate-but-equal laws. You know, the “one-drop rule” and all that. The courts couldn’t quite say “separate but equal is okay as long as those who can prove they are of mixed race can use both.”
Bathrooms split by gender aren’t equal, generally speaking, thanks to urinals. And that’s a difference that’s a fairly direct result of general biology. Where there’s co-gender bathrooms, there generally aren’t urinals, because the purpose of seperation then is to avoid co-gender nudity, I suppose.
I guess the response to that would be “Well, those past racists would have said there were direct biological reasons for seperation by skin colour, too”, but I think it’s reasonable to draw a line between actual differences and imagined ones.
Awhile ago a FB friend posted something about (and I think he was quoting someone, but I’m not sure whom) how the only way equality ever comes to the South is when federal boots hit Southern soil.
At first I was pissed: civil rights leaders from Martin Luther King to my current civil rights idol and high-school friend Jasmine Beach-Ferrara have been Southern natives. But then I paid closer attention to what he was saying. He wasn’t saying that southerners never agitate for equality. He was saying that the power structure of the south never listens to their demands until federal boots hit southern soil.
In the case of the Civil War and the 1960s and 1970s integration struggles, that was often literal: you needed to have the Union army or the National Guard come down to the south to set things aright. At this point, it may be something as peaceful as a Supreme Court decision that will advance equality in the south.
Certainly the federal government is “us” in the sense you say, Little Nemo–but there are different levels of “us.” The state of North Carolina is “us” inasmuch as North Carolinians are broadly speaking a bigoted bunch who oppose rights for LGBT folks. State level elections support continuing and where possible strengthening anti-gay legislation. Long before state level attitudes change, LGBT folks are likely to see federal boots on the ground to enforce their rights.
And that’s a good thing.
But our state was created in part to serve things above us, and above the state - our human rights. No tyrannical government may violate them, but no government doing the will of a majority of the people may violate them either.
The OP seems to have fled the thread. Considering how it was going for him, perhaps this is not surprising, but I’m curious if he learned anything.
No, because as said there are real biological differences; and because intent matters. The intent of single gendered bathrooms is to provide privacy from the gender in a situation where both genders want it. Not to oppress one gender. Which is why bathroom gender segregation is the exception to the rule.
Racial segregation on the other hand existed for one reason only: to oppress non-whites, especially blacks. Intent matters…and in the case of racial segregation, the intent has always been one of pure malice.
He would appear to have moved on to a new thread.
In general I’m a Lockean rather than a Hobbesian or a Libertarian. I believe that most people are generally good but not all people are good all the time. So morality by majority rule works. It allows the majority of good people to impose their moral standards on the minority of bad people.
One could say the same for race.
Suppose both races wanted to segregate - would that change things for you? (see below)
On the other hand, suppose all men decided they didn’t want separate bathrooms.
I agree, and you did a pretty good job of beating back the devil’s advocate (me). Still, I can think of cases where the bathroom example might be more relevant, for instance, racially-separate clubs, or even schools - what if a group of blacks argued that their club is for blacks only, and both blacks and whites want it that way? Should their club be exempt from racial discrimination laws?
One would be wrong, in this case, unless one was talking about superficial characteristics. Race is a social construct, not a biological one.
Private clubs already are exempt from discrimination laws. There are plenty of black-only and white-only private clubs.
One can say that frogs can spit lightning, that doesn’t make it true. The fact is that there are major physical differences between the genders; “races” on the other hand are arbitrary social constructs.
Since at that point we’d be talking about some completely different alternate universe, I’d have to know details about this hypothetical world to answer that.
But race and gender aren’t really analogous anyway, unless you start bringing in fantasy versions of “race” like orcs and elves.
Damn.
Toads, on the other hand, . . .
Yes - superficial characteristics. They are still biological. They shouldn’t matter, but they are real.
Some are, yes. But that avoids the question of whether they should be - and why they should be different from public accomodations.
Something tells me we’re not going to hear back from the OP, but he’s going to continue to claim he was right and true and everybody else was wrong and lying, just like he did earlier in this thread.
Certain kinds of frogs can emit poison. Those frogs tend to have a different skin color too. Fun with analogies.
Yes, private clubs should be exempt from discrimination laws. People have the right to associate in their private lives with whom they choose, and this is how it should be. This isn’t exactly controversial.
Any biological differences in race are not comparable to differences between genders, which is what you compared them to.
This shows a misunderstanding of what we mean when we say race is a social construct. While there are biological differences between people, both historically and right up to this moment, “race” has been defined in arbitrary ways. People with wildly differing physical characteristics and genetic backgrounds have been lumped together (Danes and Slavs and Iranians as “white,” Bantu and Khoi-san and Australian Aboriginal as “black,” for some notorious examples).
People from different genetic heritage do have minor phenotypical differences, but this has little or nothing to do with how “race” has been used, and the belief that it does is a major part of the reason racist assumptions still exist.
Why not?
(I’m not inclined to care about differences between races–I’m more interested in why people justify keeping the significance of the differences between genders).