I am not as surprised. I do work with different boards, city councils, non profits, etc. Often the presidents or heads of these organizations, like cemetery districts, aren’t there for the long haul. They come and go every few years. It’s really the rank and file staff that keep it together.
I don’t know his situation, but I’ve seen enough upper executive people not have a clue how the businesses they head really run.
Yes. I’m aware. But if you read the link, you’ll see that there are cases where cemeteries that are private can be treated as public for certain things. If you have a family cemetery, and you don’t sell plots, just bury family there, it’s fully private. If you are a church that sells plots, then it can be treated as public to some degree.
But he did offer her one of his own, effectively skirting the by-laws and giving them a great bargain also. Of course, they were not obligated to accept it.
My suspicion is that the employee was not communicating to the association president what she was doing. Who knows how many others had been discouraged from using the cemetery without his knowledge?
Right, I agree. I probably didn’t express my own position as well as I should have. He did make that offer and he did skirt the illegal rule. My point was that the better thing would have been to offer simply to break the illegal rule. Yes, it’s a bargain, but I can also see why someone might not want to accept charity bought at enforcing what’s still a racist rule, even with an exception.
Just so I’m clear, I think Creig Vizena did the right thing. But I also agree with the assertion that he didn’t do it in the best way. That’s not meant as any kind of opprobrium on him. He sounds like a stand-up guy. It’s merely the sort of constructive criticism I’d hope someone might give to me in such as situation.
Essentially, I’m being (hopefully helpfully) critical of someone who’s actions I, in the balance, definitely approve.
part of that though is getting rid of the old language and bylaws. because they can come back to bite at another time.
someone posted this article elsewhere…i didn’t realize the state of oregon still had racist language in their constitution until 2002. it wasn’t enforceable - but it still conveyed a message. and what happens if suddenly your courts are filled by “originalists”
These laws were rarely enforced but they did the job they were created to do: establish Oregon as a majority white state… Oregon’s population [ is ] 87% white.
Sure, but something can exist and still be enforced AND still be illegal. 
I’m guessing almost every single state constitution still has some racist language in it. The entire country is still never been fully purged of such language because white people keep losing their appetite for equity.
hey but that takes like work and stuff.
( also, realistically because there are still some people actively working against equity. and a whole lot more who just want to play nice, not talk about difficult issues, and pretend to be color blind. )
My fellow white people need to stop being lazy assholes…
Sure, but the bigger problem, I think, really is that when there chance was there to make substantial change (during reconstruction, after the 60s civil rights bills especially) that far too many whites not actively working against equity decided it wasn’t worth the effort and that they’d done enough.
Those asssholes I mean!
IDK if time will make it better, worse, or just bizarely different. If we survive another few centuries as a technological civilization, we’ll have so much control over our own biology it’ll be hard to avoid something resembling either speciation, or a drive towards increased homegeneity (for example, if some sort of modal genome really did turn out to be very advantageous, the population would converge, but not towards anything we would recognize as a particular race). To that I say:
Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because—what with trollies and dwarfs and so on—speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green.
You should spend some time on Isaac Arthur’s science and futurism channel. He frequently makes the point that if we survive our current issues and become a multiplanitary or even interstellar species, we will not have to find aliens, we will become aliens. It’s a fun thought experiment, but we have a buttload of work to do if we are going to survive to that point.
It’s curious how many people who think about it seem to take for granted that humankind as it exists presently is a fundamentally unstable species in the sense that we’ll either destroy ourselves or speciate. Few seem to consider the possibility that we could adapt the other direction and find a way to stabilize our natural species. Nor need it be technological adaptation. Ursula K. Le Guin alluded to this somewhat in her Hainish Cycle.
The counterpoint to the common enemy theme:
“You and the rest, you forgot the first rule of the fanatic: when you become obsessed with the enemy, you become the enemy!” ~ Cmdr. Jeffrey Sinclair [Babylon 5, Infection, S1E5]
Sooner or later an ideology built on hate always turns on itself. Then it takes over the galaxy with wooden acting.
I almost always have her quote in the back of my head, about how the divine right of kings seemed inevitable once and now so does capitalism, and that writers, especially science fiction writers, should be in the business of imagining a post capitalist world.
For an interstellar species it has more to do with the inability to maintain any sort of contact in real time (barring FTL.) IMHO, “freezing” our development would amount to suicide. This is, of course, a sci-fi thought exercise for the foreseeable future. However, I have not read that book. Will have to check it out.
The Hainish Cycle isn’t a book; rather a common loosely connected future history for a number of Le Guin’s stories.
One famous example of how this distinction has allowed cemeteries to enforce racist rules is the generations-long battle between Thomas Jefferson’s “legitimate” descendants and those he fathered via Sally Hemings.
That’s fair, and I suspect that many humans, maybe even a huge majority, will do exactly that!
But the universe, or just Earth, is very big, and it only takes a few hundred individuals to form a stable breeding population. If we have enough biological understanding to, as you say, stabilize our natural species, then we have enough understanding that a splinter group could do the opposite. It’s possible, but seems to me unlikely, that there will never be a community that decides it wants to adapt itself to live underground, or in the deep ocean, or in zero gravity spaceships, or in the Venusian atmosphere, or on Mars or Europa. Or in VR with only a robotic presence in the physical world, there’s always that possibility. Said groups would then be able to live in those places with a lot less investment in technological aids, and so plausibly outcompete natural humans there.
You just knew our fave death enthusiast had this one covered.
Public accommodations cannot discriminate. To the extent they are private rather than public accomodations, churches can discriminate on any basis they want to. So can private clubs, which is how whites only and/or men only golf course managed to survive so long. But that gets dicey where they cross the line from private to public, such as when a church rents out a hall to the public.
IANAL, and I don’t really want my Google search history littered with searches on whether cemeteries can legally discriminate by some ruse of being a private club, but it at least seems plausible, but only if they limit internment to club members and do not allow the general public. But they could, I would think, be sued it it can be shown that the private club is a facade to allow discrimination rather than a bona fide club. (Well, it’s always dicey being discrimination, but I mean legally dicey.)
This sports illustrated article recounts how some golf clubs are able to legally get away with discrimination through the private club loophole.
https://www.si.com/golf/2019/07/01/private-golf-clubs-muirfield-augusta-women-discrimination
The ACLU illustrates a case where the private club could not get away with discrimination because they weren’t really a private club - there was no criteria to get in other than being white, so its attempt to use the private club loophole failed.
Good thing I found a link specifically on cemeteries above…
