This is tricky for me to get right on the street. Take one hypothetical example, in which the owner has a bike shop where most of the clients are friends and sex/gender dissidents from various diversity activist groups. And they get applications from individuals who list evangelical missionary work from religions known to fervently renounce homosexuality. Now, maybe the applicant doesn’t know it’s a dyke bike shop, but is it OK to file 9 that application without an interview? I ask sincerely because neither answer sits right with me- exposing the religious youngster to a work environment sure to lead to quitting or being let go due to conflicts over valuing gender rebellion; or denying them the chance to get the job and therefore discriminating against certain religions in a way I wouldn’t stand for were the religion a less dominant one.
Or another hypothetical example where the owner of a booth which sold rare books to regular customers at antiques shows had a long term bdsm leather family, and the person hired (formally or just given some bucks to watch a different table) was a strident ‘all power imbalances reinforce the patriarchy and degrade the feminized participants’ believer. The owner could feel genuinely threatened that via the proximity of working together, the ‘employee’ would learn of the bdsm relationships and out them to regular customers, causing a potential socially awkward situation and/or loss of income. But then could a kinkster discriminate against a non-kinky feminist? (I am a feminist, FWIW) Readers, please take these on good faith that I’m not throwing out wacky and wild examples to try to play the devil’s advocate, this is shit that comes up in my work and these are subtleties I haven’t resolved within my ‘as a person who pertains to various socially disadvantaged demographics, I am opposed to discrimination and in favor of diversity’ modus operandi.
In some cases, you just don’t know who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed. Money makes a big difference, and in another reply above Gilbert Wham made a great point about offering paid work with stipulations can be a form a coercion. But what happens when the boss has less wealth than the college kids s/he hires? And what happens when the religious group functions as the clear oppressor of the owner’s demographic?
Real life example: I live in a South American country where abortion is illegal and the girl/woman who aborts and gets caught can be jailed (though the law says it should be non-punishable, in practice we recently had a teenager bleeding out in a jail cell after the gyno at a hospital called the cops on her suspecting she had tried to end her pregnancy). So, in light of this there are thousands of reproductive rights groups operating everywhere from someone’s living room to a funded area of the government trying to get abortion rights written into law. A common tactic of Catholic, Mormon, Evangelical and MRA groups is to force their way onto these committees to block all productive debate. So, in cases like the National Women’s Conference brainstorming workshops on how to achieve abortion rights, they just bounce the groups who go to break up debate. However, these groups are 100% sure that they are the victims of religious discrimination. And in that specific situation, they are the minority, because most people who would travel to a Women’s Conference are pro-choice. But in the society as a whole, the power dynamic is harder to call.
Jesus fucking christ, a doctor called the cops on her? God, I hate the world sometimes.
Also, is that true about MRA groups fucking with reproductive rights stuff? Have you got any links for that? Not, like, ‘citation needed’, I’m just genuinely interested in the evil shit these morons get up to, because I see people getting sucked in by their bullshit all the time.
interactions between people of different ideologies is inherently messy. it’s usually easier between individuals than between groups. and, if two people are willing to talk: then sometimes things can work out okay.
maybe your theoretical evangelical bike applicant is seeking, at long last, to come out of the closet! the owner could start by asking why the person applied.
the whole ‘one person joins a group just to block it’ thing is difficult. i’m certainly not saying groups can’t decide their own membership. it’d be hopeless, for instance, to insist the aryan nation brotherhood must include all races and creeds.
a business is a special kind of group, however, in that it enjoys (or not) the protection of government and civil society. the owners of hobby lobby want to use their business to impose religious views on their employees. that would make business exempt from civil rights altogether – which is against the interests of pretty much everyone.
Yeah, the doctor called the cops. Here the Hippocratic oath states that a person is a person from conception and requires would be doctors to swear to defend life from conception on. But everyone eventually got slaps on the wrist because a breach of confidentiality is against the rules for doctors and the cops can’t actually arrest girls/women who aborted-they can only arrest doctors providing abortions. What happens everyday is different, though. I really got the concept of womens’ bodies being political footballs when I moved here, where abortion is decriminalized kinda like personal use pot in some cities-it still leaves all the power to arrest or not in other people’s hands and every administration has to change the rules up.
So, the supreme court has ruled clearly that a pregnant person can get a non-punishable abortion in cases of rape, incest, grave health risk, etc. and that the public hospitals must provide those abortions. But here again is where this fine line on discrimination comes into play-if an individual doctor doesn’t want to provide the abortions on religious grounds or wants to narc on patients. It’s a tough call when girls are dying left right and center from homemade abortions and the health care provider is in a position of power and prestige over the girls (usually poor girls and women, of course the middle class just pay exorbitant fees for abortions in doctor’s offices).
Another case that sparked outrage: a mother of 2 was rescued from a sex trafficking ring where she had been held and pimped out to clients. She got pregnant during captivity. Upon release she petitioned the government for what was to be the first ever real case of someone actually getting one of those supposedly constitutionally-guaranteed abortions. She was still living in a shelter away from her family because she was going to testify against her captors and her two small children didn’t know any details-just that their mother was back now after being away and couldn’t come home yet but would soon. So, while in the hospital supposedly going to get the abortion procedure which has been a right since the 1920s yet never actually worked out in practice, not only was she bounced around because the doctors refused to operate, but someone on the hospital’s staff shared her real name and home address with the hospital chaplain (a catholic priest, but in Argentina the priests who attend to hospitals are paid by the state in a sweetheart deal penned between the Vatican and the last military dictatorship) who proceeded to her home address to urge her not to kill her unborn baby. Of course she was in hiding, but this was a very dangerous situation as her captors then knew where her kids lived; they of course finding out the hard way that their mom had been trafficked and was having an abortion.
It’s brutal, but in fact Argentina is one of the ‘moderates’ in Latin America on this-go to El Salvador or Chile for hard liners, where even if a child raped by her father is going to die from delivery, they make her have the baby. It’s the catholic church, but could very well be other religions doing the same things in other countries.
To try to pedal back towards the conversation on discrimination-who is the oppressed here? The catholic doctor being forced by her job to look the other way when someone is aborting? But if the doctor’s religion is the friggin’ Vatican, in other words the party with all the money and political clout, and real working class girls with no fancy pants popes sitting on golden thrones backing them up are dying?
Re: MRA groups and anti-abortion rabblerousing. Most are actually fathers’ rights groups (i.e. they lost custody and want the kids back; have teams of lawyers claiming Woody Allen syndrome, yadda yadda). So there is overlap with the anti-abortion movement because they loves the childz and all that. In strictly journalistic terms, it is bullshit because I couldn’t find any primary sources that sparse out the father’s righters from the religious groups, and ‘but I definitely remember some tee shirts’ doesn’t cut it as a source. Best I could come up with is a news article from the last Women’s Conference with photos where you can see a couple clashes with Cristo Rey/Opus Dei and a bus full of middle aged ladies on their way back home after the convention which was attacked by rock-throwing locals, but again they were more closely catholic affiliated, whether any of the fathers righters were with them or not.
Yes, but we were honing in very specifically on the debate between Mike The Bard and a couple other commenters, where we were trying to decide where the line is that decides if you are a business or just a professional with an assistant or two. Everyone was in agreement about the Hobby Lobby case. What comes into question is when the employees could hold more real or symbolic power over their employers and then how that affects the ethics and legality in question. In my bike shop example, the applicant doesn’t know the bike shop owner is a gender dissident-but the owner realizes the application emailed in from a craigslist post is from a practicing Mormon/Evangelical just back from missionary work. Is it legal/ethical to pass on the application out of fear of being discriminated against by your theoretical employee? Another, perhaps clearer, example: a lbgttqi couple of humble means finds it impossible to reconcile one partner’s messiness with the other’s tidiness. They decide to resolve this by scraping up enough cash to have someone come over and help clean once a week for a couple hours. Now, if the cleaner decided to come over wearing one of those “Marriage = 1 man + 1 woman; now and forever” tee shirts that tops it off with “the wages of sin is death” on the back; is it okay for the couple to ask the cleaner not to wear that shirt to their house? There’s no official uniform-it would be religious discrimination if virtually any other tee shirt were acceptable. This is about where Mike was hitting with his exploration of employer-employee dynamics and where I have trouble feeling confident I’m doing it right.
I respectfully stand by my original position: That those rules should apply to businesses, but not necessarily to individuals operating as businesses.
I think we agree on the general principle that businesses have a responsibility to follow societal codes of conduct, we just have different ideas of where that line should be drawn. You say it is as soon as money is changing hands. I say it is when the business becomes a legally recognized entity.
I think we also agree that employers don’t have a right to dictate what their employees do outside the workplace. I just believe that a sole proprietor has more right to say over what goes on within their business than does a business owner who has incorporated.
I’m not quite sure what else there is to say on the matter, but I do thank you for the lively debate! You’ve argued some excellent points.
The only way for a corporation to NOT be a legal person is to do essentially what Great Britain did before about the late 1980s, and bend the rules on limited partnerships to make it almost work.
That causes a lot ,of other issues, liability, wise and tax wise that make a new company even more difficult to start than it already is.
That is WHY Britain 1990 had the finest technology the 19th century had to offer, at the end of the 20th century!!
Right, I get you. I have some sympathy I suppose for the idea of father’s rights; my daughter moved hundreds of miles away when she was very little as her mother decided to move cities with her (physically & mentally abusive) boyfriend. And I’ve a couple of friends actually have custody of their kids over the mother. That’s what I mean about the MRA movement dragging people in with their bullshit though: they’re more than willing to take those folks under their wing, to further their other nasty, small-minded fuckery. And, as you say, there’s a lot of folks have tagged on to the whole father’s rights thing that really, really should never see their kids again, ever. I also have far more female friends with abusive ex-partners, or kids who never see their dad’s because their dads are assholes.The world is very messy and complicated is it not? And our new, shiny, super-cool pope is still the head of an organisation of evil, evil bastards…
The tenth amendment is specifically granting powers to people. It is the constitution giving you rights.
Obviously what we are discussing is where rights come from. Have you thought about where they come from in other jurisdictions where people have different rights? In France you have no presumption of innocence when you are charged with a crime, and you don’t have a fifth-amendment-like protection from testifying against yourself. Were those people granted the same rights by nature as the people of the US, only to have them taken away by a government that didn’t specify that it would not take away those rights?
If you are arguing that people are born with the freedom to do or be whatever they damn well please and governments restrict those freedoms via laws, that is a very American perspective on things, and the way that the American constitution phrases things is a reflection of that ideal. But why are people able to use the second amendment to battle some kinds of gun control laws but they can’t make similar arguments using the more general freedom to pursue happiness to argue against car control laws (whether it’s emissions or driver’s licenses)? It’s because there is no amendment granting the right to own or drive cars.
If rights are things that you are entitled to and freedoms are things that you can do without interference, then nature grants you no rights or freedoms whatsoever. Born into nature there is no one to complain to if someone bigger than you takes your stuff (whether they call themselves a government or not) or if you are killed and eaten. These things are granted by societies that enforce them.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
I feel kinda bad for you Humbabella. You have been methodically mis-informed as to the nature of liberty, the basis for common law, the meaning of the constitution, and the basic premise for the creation of these United States. You live in a world where you need governmental permission to be a human being and that’s just heartbreaking.
If you are arguing that people are born with the freedom to do or be whatever they damn well please and governments restrict those freedoms via laws, that is a very American perspective on things, and the way that the American constitution phrases things is a reflection of that ideal.
What you’ve done is create a position and then argue against your own created position. We aren’t born with the freedom to do whatever we damn well please and no one has argued that is the case. Also, it is not the American perspective (educated ones anyway). No one is suggesting that though it makes it easy to rebut if they were, huh?
If rights are things that you are entitled to and freedoms are things that you can do without interference, then nature grants you no rights or freedoms whatsoever
No one is saying that either… stop it with the straw man arguments. It’s boring.
If the entire basis for this discussion is a misunderstanding then sorry for boring you. Apparently your point is that the basis of the rights of American citizens is the Declaration of Independence rather than the Constitution. I thought you were questioning the basis of rights, rather than pointing out an error about which document they are granted by.
Likewise, if there was any confusion about the fact that I was talking about rights that had a force of law behind them - that is, rights that you could actually have enforced rather than rights that were concepts only - I apologize for that. Given that, to me, rights are not rights unless there is a way to enforce them, I would still maintain that without the Bill of Rights the rights of the people the US would be significantly diminished. If not having a Bill of Rights means people would have less rights, then that seems like it is giving people rights, even if non-explicitly through court interpretations.
Also, referring to a perceived fallacy on my part “boring” after writing this is mildly ironic.
Again, wrong. I never said that at all. You are just making more strawmen.
“…they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”
You are born with certain unalienable rights
un·al·ien·a·ble adjective
unable to be taken away from or given away by the possessor.
“freedom of religion, the most inalienable of all human rights”
synonyms: inviolable, absolute, sacrosanct;
Neither. Your rights are not granted by anyone or anything…
Before you go back to your tangent about different laws and countries, let me introduce you to the Declaration of Human Rights where the rights of all humans from all lands are partially enumerated Universal Declaration of Human Rights | United Nations
I’m getting the feeling you might not be up to this discussion. You don’t really seem to have a firm understanding of the constitution, the bill or rights, or human rights in general. And, since your replies have all consisted of strawmen arguments. I think we are done here.
Do a lot of people employ strawmen when they argue with you? Could it be that someone genuinely misunderstood what you were saying?
This is exactly what I argued against when I said:
“If rights are things that you are entitled to and freedoms are things that you can do without interference, then nature grants you no rights or freedoms whatsoever”
But you called that a strawman. Where do these rights come from? You say it is not the law, you say that they come from nature is a strawman. Is it a notion of God (this is a question not an accusation)?
If I were born in circumstances where these rights were in no way protected - say if I was born anywhere on the planet about 1000 years ago, would I still have had them? If not, what changed between now and then that I am born with rights now and not then?
Every one of these documents that grants (or merely agrees to the existence of) human rights is a legal document drafted by a negotiated by humans. Is that process a process of deciding on which rights that people want to hold inviolable or is it a process of divining the truth of what rights are inviolable? If the latter, then how do we know we got it right and that the current set of rights has the rights right? If the former, how can we say these rights were not granted by people?
If you wouldn’t mind taking a moment of your time to education rather than merely berate me from your position of superior knowledge of US and international rights, I would appreciate it.
When I said:
I tried to be very clear that my concern was rights as they can be enforced in the real world. I hope I engage in no strawman argument by guessing that you agree that rights, even if defined to be inalienable, can be rendered moot by oppression. I’ve been, in your scheme, equivocating between having a right taken away and having any hope of access to a right taken away. I’m not sure what the sense in calling me out on that is when I’ve clearly stated it is what I am doing.
