Bridal shop refuses to sell gowns to same-sex couple

boing
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I just realized that I was recently involved in a situation that perfectly exemplifies the difference between following personal and professional guidelines.

I was witness to a real estate transaction in which the selling broker lied repeatedly to both the buyer and seller and was in general quite nasty. When time came to sell my place, I told my broker that I did not want that broker in my home. She explained that industry regulations required her to allow any broker into a listed property if they were representing an interested buyer. So I told her that any offer presented by that broker would be turned down, even if it was the best one available. THAT was allowable. I can be prejudiced against him, but she (representing her industry) could not manifest that prejudice in her work.

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There is no “prestige” in being bigoted. Are you being intentionally obtuse, or is your reading comprehension really so poor that you think that’s what I said? Either one would explain your failure to understand the perfectly reasonable arguments offered by me and others. What I said is that there is prestige, and privilege, in owning a business. You claim both parties are equal, and yet the business holds the sole power to deny service. You believe this power is a right that should be absolute, and that the customer should have no legal recourse–short of going somewhere else or publicly embarrassing the business and hoping that works.

You’ve made it abundantly clear that you always side with business, and you refuse to admit that business owners or their employees do any wrong. According to you it’s all the customer’s fault. That would explain why you miss the glaring contradiction of your blind faith in the free market. If businesses could always be counted on to do the right thing, if people always put profits above prejudices, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion.

Thanks to civil rights legislation countless numbers of people were able to engage in commerce that they would have otherwise been shut out from. You consider that an “abomination”. You’re in a better position to answer your question than I am. What prestige is there in being bigoted?

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Oh, stop whining, they haven’t lost any rights. Because, after all, they are free to move their business to another country where they can be bigoted all they want.

Isn’t that what you proposed for people who they would have been discriminated against, who can’t get decent service? That they just pick up and move? Well, businesses have that same right. Therefore, it’s not an imposition on them.

What’s that? They like this country? They like the well-maintained roads that lead up to their business? They like the courts that allow them to settle disputes that come up in the course of a business, if, say, a customer doesn’t pay? They like the police to come investigate silent alarms in the middle of the night while they’re off at home? They like the trademark protection that allows them to call themselves W&W Bridal and somebody can’t open up next door and say THEY’RE W&W Bridal, and enjoy all the dubious goodwill the original had generated over the years?

All those are perks to a business selling to the public in a society. They’re paid for by taxes. The government can’t selectively grant many of those perks to those who participate fairly. And so, they don’t come entirely without strings. One of those strings are, “Hey, the country is ALL of us. You want those perks, you have to serve the whole country, not just the fraction of it you happen to not be bigoted against.”

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Yes. I’d think they were Grade-A Stupid, but yes.

They are still private actors. To be a public actor, they would need to be a government agency.

So the answer is to go the “Private Club” route? “We are a privately owned ‘Wedding Dress Club’, where you have to be a club member to engage in commerce, and we’ll choose whether or not to allow you to be a member?” Of course, they allow 99.9% of applicants, but not {minority}, or whatever?

I would argue that’s a matter between the employee and the employer. If you don’t want to do the job the employer hired you for, that’s a matter for the employer to settle, either by staffing such that there’s always people who can do the parts the employee won’t, or by firing the employee. Or they could simply say “we don’t carry that here” (there’s no obligation for a pharmacy to have every possible medication, I’ve often had to go to a specialized pharmacy to fill a prescription because my run-of-the-mill pharmacy couldn’t handle it for whatever reason).

But you can - as a private actor - simply file a “notice of trespass” with that broker, notifying them directly, “You, John Doe, are guilty of criminal trespass if you are on the property at 222 Main St., Anytown NY, 10001”.

The broker would still let them in (in fact, it’s more fun if they do), but they should let you know, so you can have them met by the po-po and let them get cuffed and perp-walked in front of their clients.

Is your reading comprehension that bad? I’ve said no such thing. I acknowledge throughout this conversation that acts of “commercial bigotry” are “wrong”. Where we disagree is whether or not people should have the right to be forced to act against their conscience, just because “we” think their conscience is wrong.

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HI!

I am the Grand Dragon of my local KKK chapter. Hating minorities and Jews is my religion. I would like to know what your profession is so I can decide whether or not I need to hire you or your company in order to support my religion of hating minorities and Jews.

Thanks!

P.S. Something tells me that you just realized that the world is slightly more complicated than you thought.

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Meh, fair enough…

Can you give an example where homosexuals are being denied electricity, food, water or oxygen?

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Thank you for making it clear that I understand your argument perfectly. You may think that discrimination is wrong, but you believe that if a business owner believes that it’s right they should be free to discriminate. That is your argument, is it not? That is why you call civil rights legislation an “abomination”, and why you’ve claimed, contrary to historical evidence, that society would naturally evolve into a more tolerant place. You object to businesses having to treat all customers equally, but when it comes to the customers you have no qualms about forcing them to being discriminated against.

If I’ve misunderstood perhaps the problem isn’t my reading comprehension but your writing skills.

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Yes, that is correct. I think they are abhorrent jack-holes for doing so, make no mistake. (I want to strive to be clear and differentiate between “behaviors I agree with” and “behaviors I disagree with but believe I lack a moral authority to stop”).

You said – and I quote –

And I think it’s been clear all along that I think what they do is wrong, I mentioned way earlier in this thread that if there was a picket-line to protest the wrong-ness of a local such “commercial bigot”, I would join in in the public shaming thereof. Your sentence there, which I quoted, is straight-up inaccurate. I do say that what they are doing is wrong. But they have the right to be wrong.

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I apologize for suggesting you don’t think they’re wrong. However I believe this assessment of your argument is completely accurate:

You think they’re wrong, but you defend their right to be wrong, because you believe they are completely equal parties. The business owner has the power to deny service, and the customer’s only options are to protest (and hope it works) or go somewhere else. You’re defending their right to be wrong because you believe the free market will ultimately resolve everything in everyone’s favor. And if it doesn’t then the customer can always move to another part of the country, because there is no right to equal treatment. And we were all “more free” before the passage of civil rights legislation which you consider an “abomination”. A large part of the country was effectively shut out of most commerce prior to civil rights legislation, but we were, according to you, “more free”. Asking a business to provide the same service to all customers is wrong, because business employees have the absolute right to act according to whims of conscience.

To be clear, I don’t use the word “whims” lightly. Had the women come in separately, had the business not known that the dresses were for a same-sex wedding they would have been able to purchase the dresses. If the business discriminates they should make that explicit. They have now, but the women who wanted to purchase dresses had a reasonable expectation of equal treatment prior to being denied service.

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Let me take your assessment of my position, and correct it to be accurate. Italics indicate changes. :slight_smile:

You think they’re wrong, but you defend their right to be wrong, because you believe they are completely equal parties. The business owner has the power to deny service, and the customer’s options are to protest (and hope it works) and to deny consumption. You’re defending their right to be wrong because you believe nobody has the moral authority to force other people to obey their personal moral compass. And if they don’t like the services available to them where they are, then the customer can always move to another part of the country, because there is no right to equal treatment. And we were all “more free” before the passage of civil rights legislation which you consider an “abomination”. A large part of the country was effectively shut out of most commerce prior to civil rights legislation, but we were, according to you, “more free”. Demanding, by force of law that a business provide the same service to all customers is wrong, because business owners have the absolute right to act according to whims of conscience.

So to expand upon my changes:

  • Just as the business has the power to deny “goods” to a customer, customers have the power to deny “money” to a business.
  • They have the right to “act wrongly” because they nobody has a moral authority to force them to act any other way. So long as they do not actually INJURE someone else (and failing to associate with them is not an injury), there is no moral authority to stop them.
  • It’s not about whether or not people are able to convince the shop-owner to act in a moral manner. It’s about people seeing “what things do I have access to”, and deciding if that’s a place they want to live, the same way people decide about access to schools, parks, shopping, commuting options, employment, etc., when deciding where to live. That is just another variable in that large complex multi-variable equation.
  • “Asking” is fine. We should definitely be asking them to act morally. Insisting that they do so via force of law is where the line is crossed.
  • “Employees” have a limited ability to act on whim. The owner makes decisions for the commercial entity which they own. Employee actions (and the outcomes thereof) are settled within the employer/employee relationship. (Maybe the employer allows them to decide for themselves and is OK with that, maybe the employer says “no, you’re fired”).

Does that clarify my position sufficiently? :smile:

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@DerekBalling Ooh! Ooh! Toss me a softball!

You’re services as Devils Advocate, whilst not required in this location; still provide a modicum of entertainment. Don’t forget your place now, sonny, otherwise we’ll have to ask you to take your horse and pony show and hit the road.

…would be a good approximation of the attitude with which bigoted arseholes would treat your promulgation of paranoiac bullshit. Delimiting roles of people on the basis of their surface attributes is always galling and should be treated as such, not minimised and fractured into the meaningless shards of near thought backed by almost reasoning.

Usually better to not start with a specific ideology in mind and contort reality to the promotion of such a collection of cobbled together fascism and sophistry.

Just sayin’.

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Let’s look at another example. Roe v. Wade is the law of the land, and in an effort to circumvent federal law a number of states have figured out various ways to make it impossible to have any facility providing abortion services (or anything perceived as being abortion related) in the state, forcing women to spend time and money to travel to another state.

How is this not an “injury” to those women and their families? And how would withholding money to the centers have any effect whatsoever on the situation? And do you really expect all women (and the families connected with them) to move to the handful of states where these draconian (and unethical, immoral, and in most cases illegal) measures are not in effect?

Especially before ACA, moving to another city/state and thus having to find a new job was simply not a realistic prospect for most people. Even now, that’s a lot to demand, just to protect the fee-fees of a few bigots who happen to own a store (or a government).

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So they didn’t sell you a dress either?

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Yes, your position is perfectly clear. You believe legally requiring businesses to act a certain way is “force of law”. Asking individuals to prioritize based on whether they can expect legal treatment in the place where they live isn’t forcing them to do anything. After all they’re the ones at fault if they go to a business that denies them service, even if they have no way of knowing that at the outset.

This is also not a moral issue. It’s a business transaction. This is not someone acting on “conscience”, because their decision to discriminate is arbitrary. As I said if the business didn’t know the dresses were for a same-sex wedding they would have sold them.

This is why your “conscientious objector” comparison is, to use your own words, “weak sauce”. A pacifist doesn’t volunteer for military service, because a pacifist knows there is a possibility of being asked to go to war. A shop that sells wedding dresses is likely to deal with same-sex couples. If that truly violates their conscience they can choose another profession. After all life isn’t about getting everything you want.

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Look at it from the other side.

A business may quite like to serve anybody but there can be social pressures against a marginalized group leading to diminished social standing of the business owner. (“He is serving the Irish! No associating with him!”)

In face of such social pressures, being “forced” to do what one would want to do anyway is a good way out.

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I don’t “believe” that. That’s a fact. If the law mandates a behavior from the business – even if they want to do so - that behavior is mandated with force of law.

I will ignore the straw-man argument you’re setting up because I have never claimed that the customers were “at fault”.

Hold the phone, there, cowboy.

Do we not hear, from the voices on the left, decrying the “immorality” of modern business? But when a business tries to act according to its owners’ morals, you then decry “you can’t act based on your morality”?

Seems like something of a hypocritical position. Or maybe it’s a ‘you can only act on your moral views when your moral views align with mine’ type of argument, which is completely arbitrary, another word I seem to recall you saying with negative connotation.

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Fine, it’s a fact that it’s force of law when a business has to operate a certain way. Is force of law always bad? If not, why is force of law bad when a business chooses to discriminate arbitrarily–not as a matter of “conscience”–and, in so doing, contributes to some people being treated as a suspect class?

As for “the left” and your claim that I’m saying that a business can’t act on its owners’ morality, I invite you to reread what I said, and do so carefully this time, with a focus on your “conscientious objector” analogy. Unless a bridal shop is asking every single customer “Is this for a same-sex wedding?” they’re not taking a moral stance. After all if they sell a dress for a same-sex wedding without knowing it they’re violating what they claim is their moral belief, even if they’re unaware of doing so. Of course if they have real moral objections to serving homosexuals they can always choose another line of work. No one’s forcing them to run a business that’s likely to cater to people they find morally repugnant. You may not feel they should have to change, because you feel the burden of change should be on the customer. The implication is that you believe the customer is at fault. If you don’t like the implications of your position you should rethink it.

I’d like to point out, also, that there was a time when your way was tried. It didn’t work out so well. Then again you have said that Jim Crow laws and segregation would have ended eventually without the “abomination” of civil rights legislation. The fact that attitudes only began to change when people who’d been shut out of commerce were given the opportunity to prove their worth is immaterial to you.

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Alright, well let me ask then: if they did do that, as part of the process of determining if they were going to take on a client, would you find that acceptable? If not, then you’ve set up something of a false equivalency there.

There is no such implication. That is a logical non-sequitur. They are not “at fault” for attempting to do business with someone who does not want to do business with them any more than a guy is “at fault” if he asks a girl out on a date and she doesn’t want to go out with him.

You confuse state and private actors. Jim Crow laws - where the state mandated a behavior - were as much an “abomination” as civil rights laws were, and in 1955, the tide was turned on dismantling the state-actor segregation. The Civil Rights Act passed, ten years later, because the tide was already turning at that point. The CRA simply replaced one abominable enforcement of morals with a different set.

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I wouldn’t consider it acceptable, but if the owners asked every customer, “Is this for a same-sex wedding?” at least they’d be honest about their position. If the business owners claim to make decisions based on their moral beliefs, they should be consistent. You seem to keep missing the fact that they apply their supposed morals arbitrarily. They only make a judgment when they’re made aware that their product is going to be used for something they find objectionable. Again, if they didn’t know the dresses were going to be used in a same-sex wedding they wouldn’t know their morals were being violated. Perhaps honesty is less important to them, morally, than preventing homosexuals from buying their products.

And, yes, you do put all the burden on the customer. According to you the customer is at fault for choosing a business they couldn’t have known would deny them service. That’s why the customer has to respond.

As for civil rights, the tide was turning, but there was no guarantee it would continue. The free market isn’t always that powerful.

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Hi Derek, I’m not sure you realize what the outcome of this type of argument/law is. You may not have been paying attention to the news earlier this year, as various states either attempted to, or did, pass their own laws that were extensions of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act - a federal law, that already provides coverage for people with genuine religious concerns. They’re ALREADY covered!

Because some deep red states felt it didn’t “go far enough” and they wanted to protest gay marriage, those states attempted truly outrageous laws that were best described as new “Jim Crow laws”. This article by Moyers & Co. discusses a few of those laws, and it was written back in February of this year - before many had even been put to vote.

For one example, the article discusses the Kansas law that ultimately failed, but was worded so it, “explicitly allowed discrimination against same sex couples and said that this would apply to food service, hotel rooms, social services, adoption rights and even employment, and there wasn’t even an exception made for government employees, so government employees could also be allowed to deny same sex couples in Kansas these rights.”

After that law was attempted, a diner in Kansas refused service to man who had previously been a regular customer. He was gay. They also put up a sign in their window that said “No gay eating.” So, that answers Troll’s (most likely facetious) question: yes, I can give an example of a gay man who was turned away from a standardly offered source of food. It has already happened.

This was deliberate class discrimination - not an attack on an individual. It only happened because the diner owner believed state law makers supported that type of behavior (and several did).

Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964: Outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion or national origin in hotels, motels, restaurants, theaters, and all other public accommodations engaged in interstate commerce; exempted private clubs without defining the term “private”. It doesn’t cover people based on sexual preference, and it should. This isn’t “new” law or some huge surprise to business owners - this is just people looking to be openly bigoted against the one group they have left to show marked power over.

It’s simply wrong.

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