Who are AC and Al Melvin?
Yikes! Sorry, had my threads mixed up. The link was posted in the SRIOTD thread.
Anderson Cooper had an…interesting…exchange with Arizona senator and gubernatorial (underdog) candidate Al Melvin about his support for SB 1062.
Grab some popcorn and enjoy the evisceration.
Regardless…
Yes, businesses have the right to refuse service to anyone. Unless they are doing so based on the customer’s race, ethnicity, sex, disability, or religion. Then it’s illegal discrimination at both a State and Federal level. You can kick someone out for being rude, or disruptive, or not wearing shoes, but you can’t kick them out for being Black or Wiccan or a woman.
In Arizona, and in many other places, and on a Federal level, sexual orientation is not one of those “protected classes,” groups designated as being legally protected from discrimination. So a business owner can kick someone out simply for being gay. Not illegal, not a problem.
Which makes SB 1062 entirely moot: people already have the legal ability to exclude homosexuals for any reason, religious or otherwise.
Now, that’s going to change, eventually, and when it does SB 1062 will be moot in a completely new way. I imagine the supporters of the bill, and the majority who voted for it, are hoping it’ll be an end-around past any future nondiscrimination legislation. But if it stands, and is eventually rendered irrelevant by federal protection, it will be challenged and dismissed by Federal courts in a hot second.
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Yeah, I want apologies for those as well.
So then is the basic worry with this bill that if/when a federal anti-discrimination law gets passed Arizona would sue or do something to slow down it taking effect?
Plus the fact that they won’t just admit their real intentions with the bill.
There are other more immediate items the proposed law is bound to interfere with:
I’ve rather enjoyed watching the mental gymnastics as they struggle to figure out which base should get the pandering - business or religion.
Oh yeah, I guess the state one would overide the local/city one.
On the plus side, this just in!
http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/26/politics/texas-same-sex/index.html
I like that phrasing.
Interestingly, we are pitting former Judge Andrew Napolitano in the SDMB for his lack of historical knowledge on the slavery issue, but in his area of expertise he **is **sounding rational:
What if I am a conservative muslim business owner, and I want to adhere to my religious requirement not to interact with women to whom I am unrelated?
I have to highlight one of the comments:
They sure are. I hadn’t heard about that. For extra fun, note that this already happened once before: in the early 1990s Super Bowl XXVII was moved to California after Arizona shot down a bill that would have made Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a state holiday. Eventually Arizona adopted the holiday and it was quickly awarded another Super Bowl (that’d be XXX), as well as getting Super Bowl XLII years later.
Unfortunately, this statement relies on a usage of the word “rational” (that is, meaning NOT batshit crazy), which is not generally insisted upon (or evidently even favored) when the SCOTUS applies a “rational basis” test.
As a friend of mine once put it, “You can’t spend 30 years dry-humping the crazy and then act surprised when the crazy wants to fuck.”
Well, Ernst Rohm, now, he would have been sympathetic!
But you never really do know how your own family is going to react . . .
Seriously?
I love that!
And then you run into even worse problems when you violate Rule One and actually throw the crazy a fuck.
This has always made me think that someone should start a religion, say the acolytes awaiting the second coming of Judy Garland (all hail her ruby shoes), in which hot, juicy, gay sex is a holy sacrament.