No. Everyone is a member of one or multiple protected classes. You can refuse service to someone who belongs to any particular protected class for any number of reasons. What you can not do is refuse service based on them belonging to a protected class.
You can tell a female smoking in your establishment she has to leave because you don’t allow smokers. What you can’t do is tell a female smoker she has to leave because she is a woman.
The law is imperfect. We as a society don’t want or need the government to be involved in every potential injustice. The laws for protected classes came about because members of minorities were systematically discriminated against. The goal should be to allow everyone in our society to be able to participate equally. The can not happen if every business in town refuses to serve a particular class of people.
Thus far smokers, fat people, or people with tattoos have not been so systematically discriminated against that we as a society have decided those classes warrant protection. If multiple business e’s decided putting up signs saying ‘no fat people’ I’d expect the law change to include them.
To call it ‘injustice’ is incorrect. What you mean is perhaps ‘unpleasantness’ or ‘unfairness’. Life isn’t fair, not by any means. You cannot legislate and enforce perfection in human beings. The best thing to do is to give no *reason *whatsoever when refusing services. One could simply make excuses such as “I’m going on vacation that week”.
Ok, that’s what I thought. But there distinction isn’t always neat. There are aspects of protected class that can’t be described that way (I listed four), but I think it still make sense to prevent discrimination against those groups. You can’t describe pregnancy or veteran status or age as “behavior.” And while it’s useful from an anti-discrimination standup to assume that people are gay from birth, it’s probably not quite that simple. The same goes for being overweight, for that matter.
Which I’m sure has and will continue to be done. If a protected class perceives a pattern of excuses they can challenge the business to prove it is not violating the law. As others have noted, businesses accept certain obligations when they receive government sanction to operate. This is now one of them. Deal with it, or convince a large enough group of people to change the constitution.
I’m not sure what the ordinary sense of “class” is to you. The above are very specifically described as protected classes, and while some of them are not part of your physical makeup, they’re still immutable and it’s illegal to discriminate based on those qualities.
Interesting that you think the “best” thing to do is mask your bigotry with uncertainty so as to fool your victims into thinking you denied them service for some other reason.
But just to play devil’s advocate and illustrate how some of this is in a murky grey area: traditionalists would say that marrying someone of your own sex is a behaviour, and one they strongly object to. As far as I know, none of the bakery owners at issue are in trouble for refusing to sell a birthday cake or a box of cookies to a gay couple, even an obviously gay one, right?
I think also that it would be rather presumptuous of us to assume that the protected classes that exist now are all there ever will be, that the question has been settled for all time. They have been expanded in the past, and most likely will continue to be expanded. In the future, they will likely include some of the groups you are dismissing now as just representing behaviour. You may even find yourself at 70 thinking that they have carried it too far, while the twentysomethings of that time period think you are just old and out of touch.
Personally, I would like to see society somehow address the rampant discrimination against nocturnal people like me (about 10% of the population, similar in size to, or slightly larger than, the percentage that is gay). At the same time, I recognise that it can be difficult to make things fair for a minority when the majority finds the status quo operates smoothly for them. And those of us who are both idealistic and logic oriented must struggle to confront the reality that there will never be a perfect system that is internally consistent and fair to everyone.
I feel fairly confident that it won’t do either one. Progressive Christians are fully aware of what the Bible contains, and what fundamentalists believe.
Plus we’ve already worked out ways to indicate that we were wrong about what the Bible said about homosexuality. I have no problem with thinking the Bible was just against homosexuality as it was practiced in that day, and not the entire concept. I had to do a lot of soul searching when I realized that homosexuality wasn’t evil, and reading alternative interpretations of the anti-homosexual verses was a part of it.
I guess a slightly longer response would be OK. Smoking and doing drugs are behavior. In many places you can’t smoke indoors, and of course doing drugs is illegal (for practical purposes anyway). That’s behavior. Any business can discriminate against you for doing things that are illegal or that offend the owner or are likely to make customers walk out. That’s always going to be safe ground. Are tattoos behavior? Yes and no. I chose to get a couple of tattoos on my arms, for example, and if it’s not too cold I usually choose to wear clothes that don’t cover them. They’re immutable for practical purposes, since I could in theory get them removed but I certainly can’t take them off just because a store owner doesn’t like them. Then again a person who isn’t me could have tattoos that express, say, political view that the business owner finds abhorrent. So saying you can’t discriminate against someone with tattoos could get tricky. Saying what being overweight “is” on that continuum is also somewhat complex, but again, you can’t just become not overweight to go into a store. I can imagine that being added to a list of protected classes and that’d be fine with me, although it’s probably less of a sure thing than LGBTQ status making that list.
