Don’t give them ideas!
Yeah. While it would be great to see SCOTUS twist themselves in knots to explain why it’s A-OK to discriminate against gay marriage but not Christian marriage, in reality what would happen is: Person who filed the suit would get death threats if not actually murdered; person gets shot down at lower levels; SCOTUS declines to hear any appeal.
Any business owner who refuses to provide services or sell to people for purely “religious” or “personal belief” reasons should be forced to publicize this fact via announcements on the home page of their website or signs at their place of business. This will permit people who find their business model reprehensible the option of refusing to do business with them.
An employee once told me that a guy who walked in the door was a convicted pedophile and she didn’t feel comfortable interacting with him. She showed me the Megan’s Law page with his information and it was horrifying.
I went out and told the guy that my employees didn’t feel comfortable being around him, so I was asking him to leave. He left.
I’d be totally fine having a sign at work, WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO DECLINE SERVICE TO CONVICTED TIER III SEX OFFENDERS
Without picking a quarrel, if this Supreme Court ruling had gone the other way, what’s the most noxious message that a business could be compelled to create for a customer?
I wouldn’t be “totally fine,” because this is really difficult in terms of ethics.
A convicted criminal entering a business is almost by definition someone who has completed their sentence, or at least is on parole. Refusing them full participation in society is tantamount to shunning them, which is basically just cruel. It’s also vigilante justice, which is never a good idea.
Moreover, either people can be rehabilitated, or they can’t. If they can be, they should be. If they can’t, they shouldn’t be able to just walk into people’s businesses.
Full confession, though, I have a close relative who is a convicted pedophile. I have refused all contact with said individual since the conviction (as hindsight made it credible for me), and so I’m clearly not living by the statements I made above. I don’t think it’s hypocrisy so much as conflicted—I don’t know what to do with such people.
I think it’s relevant to the thread as there are people who view gay sex as morally equivalent to pedophilia, or even part and parcel of it. As a gay man, I emphatically repudiate this idea, but it’s out there. The whole contemporary issue with trans and drag is because of this false equivalence.
There are literally millions of Americans who can’t see the moral distinction between “butt sex between consenting adults” and “child abuse with a sexual component.” The only solution I can see to that is to make gay (and trans) identities a protected class, but even that is going to be difficult, because minors often know their identity, but are not necessarily able to communicate it to their parents / guardians, and there are a lot of reasons why an individual might be married to someone of the opposite sex with children at 30 but part of the LGBTQetc. community at 40.
What makes you think that a business cold be compelled to create a message? That wasn’t the topic of this case.
In discussing a freedom of association argument, the similar effort asked of the person who wants to avoid the expression or association applies. A company asked to provide a generic product would still be required under Colorado law to provide that product to customers whose views they opposed. The different scenario we’re discussing is if artistic creation is involved. Artistic creation is viewed as speech and therefore cannot be compelled.
If a person of a protected class enters a business to order an on-the-menu product, they’re not forcing an association. The employee was going to be at her employment site regardless of the customer. However, requiring a person to engage in business at a site designated by a person of a protected class where the hiree doesn’t wish to go is a different issue. That’s a forced association that involves the service provider having to travel to the site and associate with people she would prefer not to. A state-based legal requirement to do so would seem to be invalid under the Supreme Court ruling.
So you’re wanting a compelled expression? That’s what the Supreme Court just ruled against.
On the other hand, a regulator could potentially require the limitation of provided services to be stated in the terms and conditions. Most businesses seeking to provide a limited service such as the website designer probably wouldn’t object to that statement, but it’s a scattering few website customers who read the terms and conditions.
To be fair, they seemed more than eager to let their strong preferences, feelings, and supposed consequences of faith be known (by way of signs in their storefronts) in the Jim Crow South.
Maybe this could make that practice fashionable again.
Sigh.
As I pointed out, free speech, just like the other First Amendment rights, can, and has, been Constitutionally limited by public accommodation anti-discrimination laws. Whites only signage. Allowing women into the Jaycees. Irish need not apply. The compelling government interest in stopping discrimination against minorities outweighs the minimal infringement on first amendment rights, especially in cases involving 1st Amendment rights in a commercial setting.
That is not always, and will not always, be the case. If the law specifically targets certain kinds of speech, or the infringement is so great as to outweigh the governmental interest, those laws can be unconstitutional.
But whatever the completely imaginary, minimal infringement of free speech where a vast majority of the speech created would be by the client like in the imaginary web design case, would be heavily outweighed by the protection of minorities afforded by anti-discrimination laws.
Would it be legal for a property owner to require as a term of a lease that a tenant provide services for, or do business with, any person regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation, etc?
Would it now be legal for a landlord to require the opposite?
The rule was: businesses providing public accommodations cannot discriminate against protected classes.
A bartender working as a temp is not a contractor. When working at the bar they are paid as an employee and are protected by employee rights laws. They are not a business providing public accommodations and therefore this rule doesn’t apply to them.
A private security firm providing a security service to the public, on contract for a fee, is indeed a business providing public accommodations and cannot discriminate against protected classes.
That would be my read. Of course, lots of people have a vested interest in making all of their employees not real employees, but “contractors” wink wink. Those people can get bent, but that’s another topic. Unless and until that happens, an employee is different from a contractor.
That’s not actually a thing. Being a pedophile isn’t against the law any more than being gay, or a furry, or black, or Muslim. Do you mean a convicted child molester?
Or attempted child molester, or collector of child pornography, or whatever. Pedophilia itself isn’t against the law, but it’s adjacent to a lot of things that are, and @Dr.Drake might not want to go into details.
I’m not privy to the court records. I know what he was accused of (broadly, abusing a position of trust with at-risk teenagers with some sort of sexual aspect). I’m not familiar with the laws in this area or jurisdiction, but if anyone wants more information pm me. I’d rather not say more publicly.
No problem. It’s the difference between what you “do” versus what you “are” which is what’s relevant, and that’s why I think it matters to the OP.
This is something I’ve been knocking around in my head for a while, like since the whole cake bakery case. It seems like it should be ok for a business to discriminate (for lack of a better term) based on what you do or want to do (verb), but not for who you are (noun). For instance, no cakes with hate speech applies to everyone. No Nazi hate, no Muslim hate, no Christian hate (also known as Christian love). It doesn’t matter who wants to promote that hate, no hate cakes. That’s equitable. If Nazi hate is allowed but Muslim hate isn’t, then that’s basing who can do the verb based on their noun, and that’s not equitable.
The same goes for no shirts, no shoes, that applies to everyone as well. If it only applies to men, or only to black people, then we have a problem. Here’s a scenario where I start to wonder though. Let’s say you open a Jewish bakery. Everyone gets kosher cakes, whether fellow Jews, Christians, Muslims, or Atheists. No problem, it’s equitable so long as you don’t restrict the kosher cakes only to Jewish customers or refuse to serve anyone who’s not Jewish. Now let’s say someone wants to get a bar mitzvah cake with a Hebrew inscription from the Torah. No problem, anyone can get whatever Jewish religious iconography they want on a cake, they don’t even have to be Jewish to get it.
However, someone comes in wanting a cake for a Christian confirmation with a verse from the Bible. You may say, “hang on a second, this is a Jewish bakery, I don’t do Christian stuff.” The equitable solution may be a policy of no religious iconography or scripture, regardless of the religion. That basically requires the bakery be secular (it can be kosher/halal too, but not specifically Jewish). I don’t know if I necessarily disagree with that, since this is supposed to be a bakery open to the public, but at same time I’m not sure that making a Jewish baker accommodate all religions or none at all is really fair either. So that’s something I struggle with, and I welcome any input to help clarify. I’m more interested in the moral/ethical implications than legal, but they do inform one another.
I think part of the problem is that the boundary between what someone does (verb) and what someone is (noun) is not always so clear-cut. Either you make cakes for people getting married or not, you don’t get to choose. But the bigot would say that getting “straight married” is different from getting “gay married.” Thus they’re not opposed to the gay person (noun) they’re opposed to getting gay married (verb). Of course they don’t want to serve the gay person period, whether they’re buying something off-the-shelf or a bespoke custom product/service. The former is bullshit, and the latter just seems to be a smokescreen to enable the former.
I guess it has the same answer as if I went into a Christian bookstore and asked them to order a Muslim religious text for me. The Jewish baker may offer passages from the Torah to anyone at all, and not offer Christian passages to anyone at all.
Once again, it’s the product, not the customer. You can’t require someone to make or sell a product, but if you make or sell a product, you can require them to sell it to anyone*.
*IMHO, which does differ with the opinion of the current right wing activist supreme court.
Nicely expressed: thank you.