I freely admit to having been too busy to follow this in any detail. My gut reaction is very similar to yours: Can, should, and how will the law discriminate between "good" and "bad" discrimination? If I'm a business owner or manager, I want the right to maintain an evironment consistent with and conducive to my "brand". Whether that right should extend to my personal, non-business-related views is the question. I'm afraid that once I study this case more deeply I will find myself on one side or the other.

Last edited by JV (2/27/2014 11:43 am)

The difference being there's no law on the books that allows anyone to throw you out of North St. Louis. 
The bill approved by the Arizona legislature is nothing more than institutionalized discrimination. It's apartheid for homosexuals. As impure as her motives are, Brewer had to veto it. 
 

I hadn't followed this issue that until Bob told me they were discussing it in a Current Events class he's taking at school.  I felt guilty that my 13 year old was more up to speed on national events than I was, so I had to do a little reading.

Alz, I understand what you and JV are saying, but the law has been pretty clear for roughly 50 years that you can't refuse services offered to the public to people based on race, gender, religion and national origin.  While I understand your roofing example, the reality is that plenty of businesses refuse to provide services in high crime areas (or more to the point, limit the area in which they are willing to work).  That isn't discriminatory, and so long as your roofing company can provide examples of jobs you performed outside of north St. Louis for black families/businesses, and so long as you aren't doing jobs in north St. Louis for white families/businesses, you'd be fine.  Same with your restaurant example--many restaurants enforce a dress code for patrons and could certainly deny entry to a pre-op tranny in a pair of assless chaps.  But that doesn't mean you could turn away Adam and Steve if they otherwise met the dress code.

Unlike race, gender or national origin, sexual orientation stirs up a hornet's nest of issues because it encroaches upon people's religious beliefs.  I'm not aware of any organized religious beliefs that view being black or female as a sin, but there are clearly such beliefs about homosexuality.  I don't personally agree with them, but I understand they exist, and understand in some cases are very sincerely held.  And this is where the "clash of rights" occurs.  If the law protects the civil rights of homosexuals (which it doesn't in many jurisdictions, but does in certain parts of Arizona), but also protects citizens' rights to religious freedom, what happens when the two meet?  Rightly or wrongly (I'd argue rightly), they're generally going to come down against the business owner.  When a jurisdiction grants a business a license, it's going to require compliance with certain rules.  If one of those rules happens to be a requirement that the business not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, so be it.  The business owner is free to move his/her business to a jurisdiction without a similar rule or not open for business.

I suppose the difficult part for me is understanding the view of the business owner.  The one example I saw in one of the news stories I read was an example of a bakery that didn't want to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.  Again, not being religious, I guess I don't get that.  Did the bakery owner believe that by making the cake they were somehow violating a religious tenet?  Is making the cake somehow sanctioning the event? 

Let me ask a question to Alz and JV, and since I happen to work in the building where Tony's is located, I'll use that as the example (for those who don't know, Tony's is a very upscale Italian restaurant).  I know the owners of Tony's, and they have always struck me as fairly old-school Italian, so I'm probably not going too far out on a limb by guessing they're Catholic.  Is your issue that you feel the owners' religious rights aren't receiving sufficient consideration because they're not permitted to turn away a same-sex couple?  Or is it simply that you don't like the fact that the government is deciding the issue one way or the other? (or perhaps it's a bit of both). 

My "gut reaction" had more to do with what seemed like PC pressure via the usual media circus, and my assumption that the bill could not be as bad as they were claiming it to be. Just tonight, I read the bill and still haven't made up my mind about it. It did attempt to avoid using "religion" as a blanket excuse, but probably not well enough. It also contained provisions that government action could be justified if "in furtherance of a compelling government interest" as long as said action is "the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling government interest", but I have to agree with Brewer that it was so vague as to invite more trouble than it might prevent. That said, I still think there should be a line between what a business can and can't be forced to do by government; I just don't know where that line should be drawn. I also acknowledge that religious freedom was a main, if not THE main, reason for the early European emigrations to this continent and believe it deserves to be respected but, again, which other principles it should trump is something I can't say.

Last edited by JV (2/28/2014 12:12 am)