Can you elaborate on how allowing employers to fire gay people would be economically beneficial? Or, if you did not mean this comment to apply to the situation discuss ITT, why did you raise this "general" point?

Obviously the situation isn't nearly as bad as the 1960s, for any of the groups. I don't see this as all that relevant. I don't see extending the current existing legal framework that already enumerates protected classes to include LGBT is going to be a CRA seismic cultural shift. For instance, while it happens, it isn't the case that gay people are been regularly rejected en masse from restaurants in sarah huckabee sanders style. That diminishes the upside of such laws, but it also diminishes the downside of whatever "economic benefits" you are worried about and whatever [insert political platitudes about ~*freedom*~] you think are relevant.

I think it is a modest step forward, that gives more internal coherence to our legal frameworks while symbolizing social acceptance of this prominent class with a long history of discrimination and meaningful suffering today. As in, it bends the needle, not breaks the meter.

For whatever reason my library doesn't have access to this article, but it notes in the abstract this shift is not largely due to reduction in discrimination. Average salary among jews is far over average population, but that doesn't negate anti-semitism in society. And you can't fire a jew for being a jew. When I think of ways LGBT suffer today, it isn't average salary; perhaps the biggest is teen attempted suicide rate, particularly from unsupportive families, which shoots way over the background rate. Of course this isn't directly address by making the laws that protect blacks also apply to gays, but I think it does make an important signal of societal acceptance that bends the needle nonetheless.

An odd choice of defense. The US constitution, with it's equal protection clauses used to bust systemic racism in, say, brown v board, is a federal document, that enumerates core values the federation holds and forces those values on smaller jurisdictions. The most racist state in the nation can not segregate their schools because of jurisprudence based on the constitution. The most racist state in the nation can also not allow business to fire people for being black because of legislative action that Congress is authorized to act on because of the 14th and 15th amendments. That is a feature, not a bug. Yet, for the weird quirks of history, the identical legal structures have not yet been applied to enumerate protections against LGBT in the same way as for race or gender.

You can't in the US either. It is just that sexual orientation and gender identity have not yet been enumerated among the protected groups federally or in a majority of states. But you can't discriminate against race/gender/national origin/religion

Consider 1950s and 60s era US. There are regions where there is systematic exclusion of blacks from civil society. Since you believe the civil rights act were wrong, how do you believe the govenrment should have instead acted?

As an individual I can systematically exclude anybody I want. But the government can't systematically exclude anybody, so the so-called Jim Crow laws were overturned.

I don't think that the government should prevent people from associating (or not associating, as the case may be) with anyone they want. As long as a person isn't denied basic necessities like food and shelter, I'm for free-association.

(Of course, determining what exactly is basic and what isn't would require a lot of discussion.)

You didn't really answer my question though. I know that employment and public access laws are not your answer, but what, then, SHOULD the government do? It might be nothing, that they shouldn't lift a finger as systemic racism by large aggregates of individuals denies blacks from civil society. Or maybe you have a solution that isn't things like anti-discrimination laws.

At some point you should probably realize there are large groups of people who don't want to be part of your forced tolerance campaign. Most people could do without your virtue signalling, your constant screeching, and your disrespectful and dismissive attitude towards anyone whose heart isn't constantly bleeding, in exactly the way you demand, for the next 'horribly oppressed minority.'

A lot of people believe that blacks and gays and whoever else are just as capable and competent to run their lives as anyone else, and don't constantly need a bunch of virtue-signalling white progressives rushing to defend them all the time. You realize when you do so that you are assuming they need your help, right? Maybe you should get on with your own life; ever thought of that?

On the other hand the overwhelming majority of black Americans believe that discrimination is still a problem. I couldn't quickly find an equivalent survey for LGBTQ perceptions, although I did find a 2013 Pew survey where 90+% said that things have improved. It would be interesting to see a poll on what percentage of LGBTQ people support the baker in this particular case.

Although I expect in both cases our hypothetical respondents might agree that what they need is legal and institutional changes which protect their rights, rather than virtue-signalling per se. But then the former is what this thread is about.

Truth and fairness doesn't depend on what the majority of people believe. It's highly suspect that progressives believe that blacks are discriminated against when they look at income disparity, but out of the other side of their mouths refuse to consider that gays have an unfair advantage when it's pointed out to them that they make more.

What's going on here? Certainly not logic or evidence. Rather, progressives presume discrimination against everyone that is not a "cis european male christian" due to their ideology. They then proceed from those presumptions of discrimination and tooth-and-clawing any possible thing that supports their view, and simply calling names or ignoring evidence or argument against them. I suspect people who find themselves in groups that the dominant political ideology since the 60s has applied victim status to don't often question that status.

As I said before, it's easy to argue for a fair and just society and ways we might go about creating and enforcing one. Double standards, argumentum ad populum, special pleading, and frankly, intellectual condescension and bullying, are not the ways to do it.

In fact it's highly ironic that progressives are so pissed off about the presidency of Donald Trump when the aforementioned strategy they so often use is indirectly responsible for his election. Keep it up, I guess?

Indeed, but I didn't make that claim. My point is that it's interesting that the "some people" who disapprove of progressive virtue signaling are overwhelmingly not members of the groups facing discrimination.

This isn't that complicated, the explanation involves the fact that we take into account a lot more than just the mere fact of income disparity when evaluating inequality. The causes of the different disparities are different, and thus suggest different conclusions as far as policy or an appraisal of fairness. Income inequality is understandable as a social problem for blacks because we know a great deal about the historical causes of that inequality rooted in discrimination. We also know that no such history exists in a way that would indicate discrimination against straight people, so the explanation for any disparity is probably found in other socioeconomic variables.

Also, it makes sense that gay people have dealt with less employment discrimination (as a particular form of discrimination) than black people because gay people have been able to hide their sexual orientation. Blacks can't stay "in the closet," as it were. Now obviously the closeting of sexual minorities is its own kind of injustice, it's just not the kind of injustice that we would expect to show up in income statistics in the same way.

What's going on here is mostly you arguing either out of ignorance or disingenuously. I'm not sure which.

You have a tendency to make bold assertions that you can't support. My belief that discrimination exists against various minority groups, or that inequalities exist as a result of past discrimination, is grounded in empirical evidence. As it turns out, I spent a lot of time investigating the evidence on my own, and not as a result of any prior ideological commitment, beyond my "ideological commitment" to the idea of equal justice and the equality of all people.

I was making a general point that my default position is to support liberal (in the European sense) labor laws. That is, I generally oppose making it more difficult to hire or fire new employees. Thus, any exception where I would favor a more restrictive regulation on hiring and firing would have to have some positive argument in favor of it. Given the long history of American white racism and discrimination in hiring and firing decisions, and the significant economic hardships suffered by black people, the loss of freedom in hiring/firing was likely justified when the Civil Rights Act was passed. I think there are other plausibly justified exceptions - eg firms that have monopoly power over a particular industry like utilities, or publicly-owned firms like universities or the post office.

I raised this point to make my own position clear. I'm working from general principles (which sound like they differ from your own) to a specific case. This lets you know how to persuade me, either change my general principles or show how, using those principles, this is a justified change to the law.

As for the economic effects, my basic intuition is that increasing the costs for a business to fire someone will on average lead to lower total productivity for that business because they are less likely to fire unproductive workers and thus also less likely to hire new ones. Here is the first paper I looked at on the subject and it does confirm my intuition of what is predicted by economic theory and tentatively concludes that in their data set there was little effect on total factor productivity:

It is relevant because I view justified non-discrimination laws as a response to a specific historical circumstance: a society with long record of unfair discrimination against a social group, with significant harms resulting from that discrimination and a proven inability to resolve through private means. The potential economic and liberty costs from the Civil Rights Act were justified because all of these things are true. So average incomes differences between gays an straight people give us evidence about the effect of employment discrimination.

I'm curious, what kind of rights do you think business owners should have in hiring or firing people?

Fair enough.

Yeah, I agree that this doesn't show that American society doesn't still have anti-semitism or prejudice against homosexuals. But it does tell us something about the effect of that prejudice, which is not to make either Jews or gays poorer than the average American.

Also, the bolded weakens your case imo. If the law you are proposing doesn't actually directly address the problem you are trying to solve, but instead is primarily meant to send a signal of acceptance to gays, then I'm opposed. That is not a match of means and ends I would support.

Okay. I don't see how this addresses my argument. I was noting my reason as a justification for the inclusion of the First Amendment protections, not justifying my view by appeal to the Constitution.

The more likely explanation is that you're post-hoc rationalizing, and that your presumption of discrimination for both groups is simply wrong.

You expect injustice to show up in statistics because you assume it's there already. This is of course, ludicrous. You can't compare two groups of people, notice that one has a higher income than the other, and then conclude that the reason one makes more than the other is because that group is oppressing the other one. Similarly, you cannot look at gay suicide statistics and say that they suffer more from suicide than straight people because straight people discriminate against them. This isn't science and cause and effect, it's ideology. And it's dangerous.



I think you are, because you're hiding, to me, obvious ideological presumptions from listeners when you speak on these topics. Most people have never read the bizarre and totally scientifically unfounded canon of sociological bull**** that has informed left-wing political opinions for the last 60 years. But I have. So I not only know your arguments, I know why your arguments are arguments in the first place, and why they're not even wrong.

All beliefs, if you dig deep enough, have no support and can only rest upon assumptions.

The belief that discrimination exists is presumed. It's most often not possible to prove it, and certainly not possible to falsify, because it's essentially a thought crime.


Equal justice is a nice idea, but is technically impossible. Equality of all people is hard to even understand what you mean.

First-degree murder is also a thought crime as it also distinguishes actions on the basis of intent. Should we also get rid of laws against that? Or how about libel and slander, which require an intention to mislead? Or fraud?

Our intentions are relevant throughout law. Anti-discrimination employment laws don't seem that different in kind to me.

Yes, and unless a person can be proven to have shown premeditation, they can't be convicted of 1st degree murder. Innocent until proven guilty.

By contrast, we live in a society that assumes white, straight, males inherently discriminate against everyone not like them, that they have inherent advantages that predetermine their success, etc. Guilty until proven innocent.

Just look at this thread as an example. I never said a single derogatory thing but was constantly called names and put on ignore because I brought up obvious flaws in the logic of progressivist social engineering. I broke the rules of Newspeak, which was doubleplusungood.

Is a business going to really not hire a supergenius innovator who can improve the profitability of their company because he's gay? The only relevant punishment a business that does this deserves or requires is the one the market will enforce upon him for stupidity.

Okay? What's your point? Your criticism was that discrimination was a form of thoughtcrime, and so anti-discrimination laws are a kind of authoritarianism because they are banning thoughtcrime. I pointed out that the kind of "thoughtcrime" used in anti-discrimination laws is standard - a jury judging the nature of the defendant's intentions and how those intentions affect their guilt.

You might be suggesting that we can't rely on a jury to actually make these judgements because American society has too many people prejudiced against straight white men to treat them fairly. An interesting argument. One might be tempted to use it as a reason to reform the criminal justice system more generally, perhaps lowering prison sentences and making sure that people who enforce the laws don't act on these kinds of prejudice as well...

Yes, if it offends enough people. Or if the owner or hiring manager is prejudiced against gay people. Also, if we lived in a completely atomized labor market, I agree that there would be economic pressure against employment discrimination. However, as you know economies take place within specific social settings, and some societies could enforce unwarranted and unfair discrimination through consumer activism (eg boycotts and social shunning) or cartel-like arrangements, or even nominally fair laws like separate but equal.

Consider the following situation:

http://www.bakersfield.com/news/same...4ee51a223.html

In this specific case (the supreme court case), you're right. The decision had to do with the symbolic expression of what the cake was intended to celebrate. I'm just saying that there are lots of ways that one can learn of the end destination.

But the not-knowing-ness *IS* a feature in the system. There are things that one can overtly point to and say "I now know that this is for a gay wedding." And then there are ones that can't. And that knowledge basis has an impact on the outcomes.

I'm using "gay" wedding cake instead of "gay wedding" cake in order to emphasize the knowledge of the purpose of the cake. Because that part is the heart of the expression issue. If we make it overt and explicit, then we can keep the focus on that aspect of it.

You can pretend it's a pointless nit, but that would be a lack of depth in your understanding of the issue at hand. To argue discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, the customer's sexual orientation would have to be the issue. This is significantly different from saying that the end destination of the cake is the issue.

If a straight person can go in and buy a cake for a gay wedding, but a gay person could not do the same (holding everything else equivalent, including the knowledge of the end purpose of the cake), you could say there's discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. But if both people would be denied the cake, it's not discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, because the customer's sexual orientation isn't the issue. It may still be illegal, but it won't be considered discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. It would have to be under some other standard.

An excellent point.

No, antidiscrimination laws are a form of tyranny because 1) they take away freedom of association and 2) you are guilty until proven innocent. Discrimination is not falsifiable, let alone provable. Not in the same way malice aforethought is, at least. It's simply an assumption made and applied to a singular group of people in our society; ironically, a form of discrimination itself. This is telling when engaging with hardcore progressives; whenever confronted with the scientific or evidentiary basis for a claim like white privilege, some of them actually argue that questioning it proves that you suffer from it!

I don't think laws should be made against having prejudicial views, period. It is a form of thoughtcrime enforcement, both unfalsifiable and unprovable. For example, in Germany and Canada and other places it is a form of hate crime to be a holocaust revisionist. Of course such a thing is patently absurd. Many 'revisionists' are virulent anti-semites, but not all of them are, nor should it be a crime to do investigations, even biased ones, into historical events.




So it's a crime to offend people, now? In my view, it's a crime not to offend people. Offense is the essence of truth gathering. Imagine a world in which we had conversations where no one said anything even remotely offensive and beat around every elephant in the room. You know what would happen?

Nothing.

When you treat someone like they are incapable of dealing with the often harsh truths about reality, it's an insult and disservice to them far greater than saying something that might hurt their feelings. I'd much rather deal with adults who have developed adult coping mechanisms. Those that feel they are too sensitive to discuss often insensitive topics would be better suited from disengaging with the conversation than throwing insults around or special pleading.

Why should it be against the law to express, in word and deed, non-violent prejudicial views as a private business owner?

I agree that state sanctioned racism is wrong and there should be laws in place to eliminate such a state enforced monopoly on goods and services. Or that anti-discrimination laws should apply to truly public goods and services such as what a government provides or what can only be obtained from a monopoly. However, when you start using the government as your personal club to put well-meaning people out of business when you could have simply walked down the street, it's high time we question the efficacy of the laws and what actual harm they're doing.

If this cake was not to be personalized with names or figurines, I wonder how the baker even knew it would be going to a gay wedding.

I imagine the plaintiff must have gone out of his way to say so because he was looking for trouble and a reason to sue. If he went in as a typical person and said he wanted to buy a wedding cake with x colors and y decorations, I imagine he would have been just another valued customer.

Sure, I'll acknowledge that antidiscrimination laws take away some people's freedom to run their own business as they wish and can sometimes lead to a less free society overall. Two further responses:

1) I don't think our rights are or should be unconditional. I oppose capital punishment, but not because I think murderers don't sometimes deserve to be killed. Freedom of speech is not absolute - e.g. we are not free to slander others. Thus, if a group of people can make a convincing case that a right is being used to harm them to a sufficient degree of seriousness, and we can't come up with plausible alternatives to alleviate that harm, I think we as a society should be willing to re-examine and modify that right. As Jesus once said about the Sabbath, rights are made for man, not vice versa. I don't take this lightly - there is a reason why laws that make these changes, like the Civil Rights Act or the 14th Amendment, are such epoch-defining laws. But I think it is better to keep this flex in our conception of rights so they can adapt to changing situations. However, I acknowledge that this view will sometimes lead to legal systems that would be regarded as tyrannical under the previous conceptions of rights.

2) Anti-discrimination laws are a long-standing part of American jurisprudence. You seem to be so overwhelmed by popular culture that you aren't distinguishing between it and the law. Sure, lots of people on Twitter or wherever will assume guilt. So what? That's why we use law and courts. The mob will always be simpleminded in its pursuit of justice/revenge. The law doesn't assume guilt and so acts as a shield against that mob.

Now, it's true that the law doesn't always live up to this ideal. It can sometimes act in a prejudicial way, whether because of social pressure for certain outcomes, or because the people who work in law hold prejudicial views. That is a tough problem. In such situations, the people who are the victims of the law could justifiably try to get rid of the otherwise okay laws that lead to that abuse, whether those laws are anti-discrimination laws or prison sentencing laws, etc. Is that your claim here?

I agree, we shouldn't make laws against having prejudiced views.

I didn't claim it should be a crime to offend people. Rather, I was giving examples of when a free market system might not punish discrimination, as you claimed was the appropriate punishment.

It's not a crime to be a holocaust revisionist in Germany, it is a crime to publicly express symbols or propaganda for Nazism. Holocaust revisionism fits that bill nicely.

And before people run to the barricades to attack that, Germany knows very well the potential price of replacing facts with propaganda: 60 million lives. It's fine to disagree, but it should also be easy to understand.

As a business owner, I think there's an important line between the rights that I have and the rights that my business has. The two are not the same thing. When I set up and registered my company I did it with an awareness that, while the two intertwine, I would have certain responsibilities and liabilities that are not those of an individual. Equally, I set up the company in such a way that it has certain liabilities that are not my own.

I realise this gets messy when it comes to what I can do on behalf of my company, but the conflation of the two entities at times in this thread is a mistake. I can discriminate in my private life in ways that my company cannot. That's because my company is not me, it's a commercial entity.

It's common practice in law to define a corporation or business as a "legal person". This way you can purse civil and criminal cases versus that "person". It is my understanding that in the US that "legal person" has more rights than typically granted to European equivalents, and maybe the most well known landmark case to that effect is the infamous Citizens United v. FEC, which essentially grants corporations free speech.

Granting corporations too much rights is of course problematic as corporations are in themselves a form of structure that shields individuals from a lot of legal consequences (but not all). So if the corporations gains the same rights as citizens, you risk ending up with those owning or running larger corporations with plenty of legal funds becoming a privileged class with "double shielding" from the courts.

And as a nerdy sidenote it can be mentioned that the state is usually also defined as a legal person. This is how you get to sue the state. Or how you end up in those funny scenarios where the state investigates and fines itself.

Yes it is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_a...locaust_denial

Sure, legal fictions are important, but it still serves to highlight the distinction between the business and the business owners. And when we're talking about the refusal of service on certain grounds, I think it's an important distinction.

Ok, great.

Rights are inalienable. But sometimes there are conflicts of rights. If one imposes upon someone elses rights, they have committed a crime and need to be punished. Murder is taking away someone elses right to life and liberty, slander is taking away someone elses right to free speech (they are not there to defend themselves) etc. There needs to be remedy for situations where rights are infringed upon.

This baker situation is a clear cut case of rights conflict. One side doesn't want compelled speech/expression (the baker) and the other side doesn't want to be denied service for an immutable characteristic, despite the behavior that defines them not being proven as either a characteristic, or immutable. When looked at in the actual context of the CRA legislation, it's clear that it wasn't intended to apply to people who can simply walk down the street to get what they need. It was intended to break up state sanctioned racist monopolies/oligarchies. This situation has clearly never applied to homosexuals as it applied to black people.

This is a problem with law. There is always a context for laws and they can easily be misinterpreted, which is why society should attempt to keep them at a minimum so as not to infringe upon citizens' inalienable rights.

This is very, very dangerous territory. As I mentioned above, rights are inalienable and can only be liened upon when they are used to infringe upon someone elses rights. Refusing to bake a cake or hire a white person is a personal preference that a sole proprietor should be entirely free to make. No one has a right to my goods and services.


The tyranny of public opinion is always the first step on the road to actual tyranny, and until freedom of expression and speech are enshrined as sacred again, free society is in danger.

No, they aren't. Your right to vote can be taken away from you. This claim needs to be strongly moderated for this to be true. (And I know that you're leaning on the Declaration language here, so life, liberty, etc. but even as a declaratory statement, I'm doubtful of the truth of it applied to those. I view them as more rhetorical statements than factual ones.)

That's a really bad reading of what slander is or what free speech is. Someone can say something slanderous with you physically present. And I don't even know how you say that this is a free speech issue.