In the U.S., yes. The requirements are fairly strict. The barber in question would not have received the permit, if he had specified the reasons as given in the original story.
I think we can all agree there are men’s-only businesses, and this is right and proper. The guy who performs vasectomies, for instance, is not going to be sued successfully for turning away a prospective female customer.
It might be seen as the thin end of the wedge. For instance, in the U.S., there were men-only breakfast clubs. This was okay…until it turned out that the men were doing business there. This was seen by the courts as improper, because it denied women equal opportunity to business. If you’re going to have a men-only party…be sure to restrict it to those legitimate purposes that do not entail illegal discrimination.
Bull. I’d hold her in personal moral contempt…and still celebrate her triumph over religious bigotry. You seem to imagine that supporters of civil rights are “respecters of persons.” We aren’t. We despise bigotry of all sorts…and oppose illegal discrimination, even when it harms stinkards.
Yes. If he doesn’t want to touch people’s hair, he shouldn’t be in that job. It is illegal to offer that service to only one gender.
His choices are to cut hair regardless of gender (or race, age, disability, etc.), or to not cut hair. Or, possibly, to ensure that there’s someone in his business who’s willing to cut her hair, depending on whether the anti-discrimination requirement is on the business or the individual.
Being on the individual is just ridiculous. If someone hires a person, and tells them that one of their job duties will be to cut women’s hair, at that point, the person can decline the job, if it is not one of the listed duties, then they have the right to refuse when it comes up years later.
They did in fact happen to have someone on staff that did not have a problem with doing women’s hair, the owner offered to let her come back when he was there.
Had that person been there at the time, when she asked for a haircut, do you feel that she could have insisted that the owner do her hair, rather than allowing the person without a moral restriction to cut it?
I see slippery slopes when they are in fact, both slippery, and slope-like. This qualifies for neither. Anti-discrimination laws were necessary when there was very real peer pressure in the business community to continue to discriminate. If you took down your “whites only” sign from your restaurant’s window, your food provider would drop you as a customer, you would face organized boycotts from large numbers of biggots. Even if you as a business owner would rather open your doors to diversity, social and economic factors made that extremely difficult and risky. The most sensible thing to do was to stick with the status quo. An external force was required to step in to change the equation, so the business owner that wants does not want to discriminate is on an equal footing now with the one that does.
A single businessman, operating his own shop, not pressuring others to join his discrimination, and honestly probably operating at an economic loss due to his convictions (this probably isn’t the first female turned away, just the first that found it easier to file a complaint than to walk to the next shop) does not pass the test of being a linchpin in bringing down civil rights. He is fighting an uphill battle to keep both his livelihood and his personal moral convictions. If he wins this fight, it only means that he did not get shoved down the slope. If he looses, then I see a potential slippery slope where people find more and more convoluted ways of infringing on others rights any time they decide to be offended.
He’s probably not operating at a loss because the odds are good that he’s rarely ever had to turn away a female customer. There have been two places I’ve gone to over the years to get my hair cut that were old school men’s barber shops (one even had a barber’s pole). I never saw a single woman come in and ask for a haircut. Not once over a period of nearly four years. But, hey, I don’t live in Canada. Maybe he turns women down by the score on a weekly basis.
I agree, not much of one on the surface. I seriously doubt that it would make much of an impact. One woman obviously did walk into his shop wanting a haircut that he turned down. Odds are, it was not the first he turned down in his many years, meaning that catering to female customers could net him tens of dollars a decade. That’s not nothing.
On the other hand, he may be operating at an economic loss because people don’t want to get their hair cut by him, or his shop, because they feel he is a bigot for not cutting women’s hair. He may have a more direct loss if he ends up paying fines, not to mention paying for his defense, and the loss of time dealing with this, rather than cutting hair and making money he is losing already, even if the Tribune finds for him. That certainly is a cost, and a loss to his business.
Ron Paul is not wrong when he implies that bigotry can’t be solved through legislation. (Ron Paul is not wrong on many things, but he isn’t really right on anything.) There are times and places where such things are needed. There are people having their rights violated far more than not getting a haircut at a specific place by bigotry much more institutionalized and official. Once we have solved every other gender/race/religion/sexuality/drug use issue that is actually affecting millions of people’s lives, if this woman hasn’t found a better barber by then, we can take another look.
You said he was probably operating at an economic loss. No, he probably wasn’t. Maybe he could have made a few more bucks if he included female customers but that isn’t quite the same as operating at a loss.
I doubt it. Most of his customers probably don’t care if their barber doesn’t want to cut women’s hair. After all, they choose this barber knowing full well that he’s all about cutting men’s hair. It wouldn’t bother me in the least if my barber didn’t want to cut women’s hair.
Operating at a loss doesn’t mean what you think it means. At any rate, I feel for the guy. He took reasonable steps to make sure he could have a job while at the same time maintain his religious convictions. If he was some jackass who got a job at Pro Cuts and then bitched about cutting women’s hair I’d laugh and tell him to suck it up or quit. No. This guy specifically went into a business where he could reasonably be sure that he would never have to violate his religious beliefs. Quite frankly, I think we find a better solution than forcing him to quit or honor his religious beliefs.
I’d still like to know more about this woman who made the complaint. Is she just some random woman who walked in off the street or some wannabe coiffured Rosa Parks?
I hope common sense prevails, as it did in Stopps Vs Just Ladies Fitness wherein the Tribunal decided against the complainant, stating that:
“Given that Mr. Stopps has a number of co-ed gyms to choose from, including one closer to his home than Just Ladies, I can find no basis upon which Just Ladies should be faced with significant and irreversible damage to its business interests.”
and
“Viewed objectively, I am unable to find that Mr. Stopps’ human dignity was adversely affected by the policy of Just Ladies. He had available to him a number of other options, but he pursued none of these. He gave no credible reason why he failed to so in the face of the reasons he went to Just Ladies initially. In my view, Mr. Stopps went to Just Ladies seeking a service that he knew would be denied; he fully intended to pursue a human right complaint. The human rights system is not to be used to make a point; it is to be used to address discrimination and to further the purposes of the Code so that all can participate in the activities of British Columbia without fear of adverse treatment based on a prohibited ground of discrimination. Allowing Mr. Stopps’ complaint would undermine the purposes of the Code and minimize the real and daily discrimination faced by many in our society, including men.”
An accountant would say “economic loss” would be hyperbole in this situation. I should have gone with opportunity cost. And I was acknowledging that the lost opportunities were fairly negligible, but probably not zero.
That was probably true before all this publicity. If all of this goes away tomorrow, I would think that he would probably still find himself with a smaller clientele because of the fairly negative publicity. Would it bother you at all to pass by a few protesters outside his establishment?
Operating at a loss means exactly what I think it means… less revenue than cost… negative profit.
I said economic loss, which is damage to your balance sheet It doesn’t mean you have less revenue than cost, but it does mean that your revenue could be higher (or costs lower) without this event. This may have been hyperbole in the “tens of dollars a decade” situation, but not so much when your name is in the paper as a bigot. He may still stay in business, and it’s possible the publicity will end up being good for him, but I think that he will end up with more of a negative stigma to his name than anything because of it.
Solution:Tribunal can give the woman a coupon to Pro Cuts.
It doesn’t really matter what the circumstances of the individual are. If Rosa Parks had been the first black person to be told to get to the back of the bus, rather than an institutionalized system of segregation and oppression, I would have agreed that it’s the bus owner’s right, even if I did think he was completely in the wrong.
As far as Stopps goes, bear in mind that there is a unique privacy interest for a women’s gym, but there is no unique privacy interst for a barber shop. In other words, you are trying to compare apples and oranges.
I don’t see it as apples and oranges. You say it is, because you think the facts of the case are so vastly different. But I don’t see the facts as being so different. I think this is also a case where the complainant is trying to make a political point, but doesn’t really have any actual grievance. And The human rights system is not to be used to make a point.
The difference between the two cases, is that in one case, women didn’t want to allow men to be members of their gym, and in the other case, men didn’t want to let women become customers. One was for ‘privacy’ reasons (not really sure what that means - they can exercise without having men look at them, I guess?) and the other was for religious reasons.
I’m not religious myself. But I respect other’s rights to be so. I’m also not a self-conscious woman, but I respect their right to be so.
I predict a loss for the complainant. Care to weigh in with your prediction?
I wonder how the barbershop’s more recent offer to bring in another barber to cut her hair will play into this as far as reasonable accomodation for her goes.
Why would she even want to get her hair cut at that place now? Who wants to get a haircut from someone who dislikes you and resents you? What an awkward and tense experience that would be, the opposite of a relaxing haircut.
It seems to me she isn’t interested in a haircut at all, she just wants to get at the Muslims and make them do her bidding. How easy it would have been for her to go somewhere else. She’s not Rosa Parks, she’s a controversy mongering troll, using a well intentioned law to stir shit and harass harmless people.
I’m no fan of conservative religion’s view of women and sex. But this is not the way to go about enlightening people.
The barber does not have unacceptably bigoted views.
His religion does.
His religion is lame and backward. Among many other things it essentially subjects women to third class–not just second. It absolutely sucks as a religion. Its more devoted fanatics, of which there is a reasonably high percentage, think that even an insult against Big Mo (PBUH) is cause for a fatwah to attack the insulter.
Of the large religions, it’s easily the most stupid, the most repressive and the most regressive; many of its followers are stuck in time 500 years ago when women were property.
This poor bozo was born into it. Like the vast majority of religious adherents, he has not found his way out of tenets drummed into him since he was a child. In his mind he’s just following God.
In this case, God isn’t telling him to blow up the WTC. God’s telling him not to touch women he’s unrelated to, and his lot in life is to be a frigging barber. He is at least trying to earn an honest living with the talent that nature has granted him.
Along comes this petty, vindictive insufferable prick of a woman and decides–quite literally–to make a court case out of this poor boob’s honestly-felt conviction. Her high and mighty superficial Great Cause is the cause of Justice for All Mankind, but the narrow cause here is a bug up her ass from an inflated ego and a quickness to take an insult where none was intended.
There is room in society for us all as long as we are reasonable and peaceful. There is a qualitative difference between a blue collar schmuck trying to eke out an honest living who wants to keep himself pure for his God, and a racist homophobe keeping gay black men out of his country club while he pillages the country treasury with secret backroom relationships that excludes gays and blacks.
The inability to legislate the difference in these two kinds of cases is why these laws fail. It’s not the law that’s the ass. It’s the citizen abusing the law.
As an individual raised in an Islamic country, it is not difficult for me to see why there is so much rage directed against the arrogance of the West, and I’m one of the greatest mockers I know of the idiotic religion of Islam. But it’s people like this woman who break down any hope of bridging the gap.
Sure; if the barber had a grain of sense he’d take her in, give her her buzz, get some oily and stinky hands all over her face and head and have her leave in a huff swearing she’d boycott the barbershop for life and get all her pals to boycott it too. The mullah gives you a purification because you’ve actually helped your religious cause, and it’s all good. Instead, this poor naive soul tries to keep himself pure, tries to explain his feelings to this twit, and gets castigated publicly for his “bigotry.”
Want to make an issue of Islamic bigotry? Man up, mock Mo and his lame-ass religion publicly…throw in a cartoon of Mo while you’re at it. Duck. But at a bare minimum be willing to place the blame where it lies.
But don’t take it out on the follower just hoping to get along and take a paycheck home to his wife and kids.