The “mom and pop store” in question, Memories pizza parlor, was hardly destroyed. It got nearly a million dollars in donations from fellow bigots. Some are saying that gays are throwing their relationships in peoples’ faces. But maybe this pizza business threw their bigoted beliefs in our faces knowing that the mouth-breathing Fox news contingent would hear about their “boycott” and support them so they could profit off it?
Isn’t this [ETA: the A vs B John-Jake positions above] just a reformulation of the now-so-very-tired “You’re intolerant of intolerance” gambit. In other words, "You’re discriminating against discrimination! "
Why, yes. Yes I am. Here, I’ll blow your mind: I am intolerant of discrimination as well.
Why do those people think this is such a logical gotcha-ya?
Because it is all they have.
You must have lived a very isolated life. Plenty of retail workers will gladly tell you hell is other people and the hardest part of the job is dealing with customers. A prime motivation of craftsmen and craftswomen who start their own little businesses is picking and choosing their customers.
Smartest post in the thread.
You think it’s normal, expected even, for people to encounter others who refuse to do business with them unless they alter their behavior and compromise their principles?
How in the world do these exchanges occur?
“I would like to buy this head of cabbage.”
“Only if you swear that Justin Bieber is the Antichrist and stop wearing yellow. It washes you out!”
“NEVER!”
So, you don’t like gays. And you run a bakery. So some gays come in and want a custom artwork cake for their big gay wedding. Not wanting to run afoul of the laws or look bigoted, you take their order like any other customer, and give them a quote.
But, uh, could you say “well, uh, we normally do the wedding accessories and art for the straight folk. Our artist isn’t too skilled with gay culture and we don’t have the right plastic bits for the cake. We’ll do our best, but, Bob’s bakery down the street specializes in this…”
Or would you still seem like a hopeless bigot?
I think you answered your own question, there.
Look, if someone wants to be a bigot and get away with it, it’s quite easy. “I’m sorry, we’re too busy to take on any new orders right now.” “Sorry, all the items on this shelf have been placed on hold by phone orders.” “Sorry, due to stock shortages, after reviewing your order I’m not sure we could do this on time at all.”
It’s the same idea behind right to work laws. An employer can fire you for no reason at all - and so, if they wanted to fire someone for being gay they simply keep their mouth shut about the why and fire without cause.
I don’t like that it can be used in such a fashion but the same methods allow me to brush off clients that would otherwise put a strain on business (clients that don’t pay on time, clients that are too persnickety and will never have a project completed to satisfaction, clients that will call you 25 times a day, etc), so they should be kept around.
HA!
Uh, no. I worked for years in retail, including (shudder) mall work. I worked for an attorney who handled cases for disabled veterans and people on Social Security/Disability–folks who needed help but were not, to put it mildly, always the most socially competent people. I worked for a humane society and dealt with it from both ends, both from people who were super-animal-rights and thought we were terrible for euthanasia, and folks who abused animals to the point of death. And now I work in a public school with about 40% of students living in poverty. Don’t think that your university library job entitles you to tell me my life in sheltered, pretty please.
Despite all that experience–perhaps because of all that experience–I am able to comport myself in a way that has never, not once in my life, led to someone choosing not to do business with me. (Well, okay, I’ve applied for jobs I didn’t get, so you can count that if you want).
But I’m also a straight white middle-class man, so I’ve got that going for me.
As for craftsmen and craftswomen being able to pick and choose their customers–are you freaking kidding me? I know plenty of crafty folk who are trying to make a living at it. I have never heard of any of them turning a job down because they don’t like the person who’s willing to give them money to do their job. That’s just about the last thing on the minds of most people who–and here’s a secret–are constantly struggling to make ends meet.
Businesses like that can still get nailed if they do it often enough. If you can demonstrate a pattern in the people they refuse, they can be prosecuted even if they never admit the reason. It happens with landlords often enough; sometimes groups will conduct sting operations with comparable black and white renters.
But your overall point is valid - it’s difficult to prove.
You are making an assumption that they simply want to get away with it. In the cases involving gay marriage they have not just wanted to get away with it. Ironically they were discriminating to force their beliefs on other people. We have cases where they were intentionally very public about their desire to discriminate.
It’s lonely being the only bigot on the block, they want other people to share their bigoted beliefs with. If they were quietly bigoted no one would know and most wouldn’t care.
Probably, to the people who are having the most hysterics over this issue. I suspect nothing less than a vendor reacting with overwhelmingly ecstasy about doing a gay wedding would be acceptable to them. In the real world every vendor, especially vendors in the wedding industry, has clients they don’t like and if they know they really don’t want to work with that potential client, for whatever reason, they will try to suggest the potential client find another vendor. Unfortunately, polite subtlety doesn’t work on some people and things get very impolite fast.
Not all craftsmen and craftswomen are struggling to make ends meet. The more successful do pick and choose their customers. The type of cultural performances I do (authentic Roma folklore divination, music, and dance) falls under that category. I interview every client and pick and choose.
Is Race, Color, Religion, National origin, Age (40 and over), Sex, Pregnancy, Citizenship, Familial status, Disability status, Veteran status or Genetic information ever a deciding factor in your decisions?
Right–and if I remember correctly, you also have a state job. (Please correct me if I’m wrong). Every single person I know who derives their primary income from running their own business–every single one–is trying to get more customers, not trying to winnow down their client base.
I imagine there might be the very rare entrepreneur who can afford to turn clients away on a regular basis. But that ain’t how most of the world works, and that’s why most people don’t find themselves in the situation you describe as “common.”
Let’s be clear that “for whatever reason” covers a broad range of reasons.
At one end of the spectrum, “for whatever reason” covers bigotry: I think you gay people should be second-class citizens and don’t want to participate in treating you the same as I’d treat everyone else.
At the other end of the spectrum, “for whatever reason” covers crazy client behavior: when I offered to shake your hand, you threatened to kill me, and you’re so unpredictable that I don’t feel safe around you.
There’s no way that the two reasons should be covered by the same “for whatever reason.” Fortunately, they’re not.
Not destroyed, sued is fine with me. And when they lose, they have to be forced to write a 10 page essay detailing how racial discrimination is the same as sexual orientation discrimination, and if its bad to discriminate against blacks, its equally bad to do it to gays. Also they have to include that serving someone as a business has no bearing on your support of their beliefs.
Some businesses do turn away customers - for example an advertising/design agency may decline to take on a job that goes beyond the normal scope of their expertise, or an engineering company may decline to make something that they feel is too likely to fail, etc.
In each of these cases however, they’re saying “we don’t do that kind of work”, which is okay, and as already discussed, is not the same as saying “we don’t serve people like you”
Troutman:
Not all believers in the Bible ignore those rules. And neither is it a throwaway line isolated amongst unrelated subjects, it’s right in the middle of a passage that prohibits various sexual couplings.
Whatever the social correctness of non-discrimination against gays, you don’t serve the cause well by mis-stating the sources.