Why did this case go to the Supreme Court then? Clearly there are a lot of people who do think they are being trampled on by it. It's not their fault that you can't see past your own nose.

In a very abstract way I am OK with this line of reasoning. I think there is at least some validity to the idea that certain kinds of social arrangements might be preferable to others because they are relatively more natural to human beings, or because they are more likely to maximize the satisfaction of those goals which are nearly universal for human beings. The idea can be problematic though, precisely because human beings are generally very bad at assessing what constitutes a "natural" arrangement (for reasons that are fairly well explored in the literature of cultural anthropology), and because of the naturalistic fallacy.

The biggest problem for you is that it's very clear from all the available historical and anthropological evidence that the way nature has provided for us to pursue the fulfillment of the basic human goals which you mention is through the development of culture, and very explicitly through the development of social institutions, norms, and other restrictions on your abstract notion of freedom. Just as one example, you mention trade, on which you might find instructive Mauss' classic text The Gift, or Malinowski's works on the Kula exchange culture of Papa New Guinea. But basically in every category you mention (family, reproduction, worldview construction, trade, economics in general) all of the evidence shows the fundamental importance of human cultures -- and specifically the rules and structures they impose on individuals -- in achieving human goals. Those goals are nowhere in nature achieved through pure individual agency compatible with your theory of natural rights.

So, you're stuck asserting that evolution leads to your very particular notion of freedom, but you are both unable to provide any actual evidence for the existence of that freedom in nature (you've only offered assertions above), but the evidence which exists directly contradicts your theory. That leaves you, apparently, arguing for a supernatural grounding for your notion of freedom, but again you haven't presented any argument to support your belief.

This is a false choice in at least a couple of ways, I think. First, I often argue for policy preferences on pragmatic/utilitarian grounds. Secondly, rejecting the concept of natural rights as you've defined them does not entail rejecting the idea that certain general values can be justified by an appeal to objective features of nature, for example the universality of certain human goals like the ones you mention above. I can't ground a principle of fundamental human equality in some precise notion of a "right", but I can reason that such a principle is useful in the construction of laws because it leads to the favoring of laws which provide for the realization of those goals. But that then is an empirical question, which I will concede is perhaps still somewhat open as a matter of human history. But the point is I don't have to necessarily assume any principle as a metaphysical truth, I arrive at the desirability of some principles through an empirical process, assessing the various forms of human social organization that exist and have existed historically.

Well I'm glad you're ok with my line of reasoning.



It's curious to me how culture does anything of the sort, and the claim that culture is the way nature provided for us to thrive is dubious at best. I mean, how does one even gauge such a thing? What metric do you use? What makes one culture superior to another? Why the push from progressives to destroy western culture, and preserve all others?

Meh, like I said the claim that 'culture' is responsible in any significant way for human development and flourishing is dubious at best. I agree that some cultures are better than others at achieving things, but your claim is pretty general.

I don't need evidence, and your requirement for evidence is unfounded. The freedom that I experience pre-government is total (with physical constraints), and it's self evident. Even the definitions of political terms agree with me.

Anarchy: 1) a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority.

2)absence of government and absolute freedom of the individual, regarded as a political ideal.

You seem to be conflating order with freedom. Pre-government situations are totally free, but totally disordered. And of course, power structures soon develop to establish order, because it is a human need. The proper structuring of a government is indeed the balance between freedom and order.


Nor do I need to. Belief in God is axiomatic. But you can believe in just nature too, it changes nothing.



Ya, you do whether or not you realize it. You are operating from axioms the same as anyone else who forms beliefs about reality. Any 'assessing' you do is 100% in line with the principles you just assume are true, and are reasoning from. I could ask you to do the same thing you required of me, and list out your 'desirability of principles' based on your moral judgements of various societal forms as well as evidence that the principles you reason from are true, but I won't because I already know you can't do it.

I should perhaps clarify that I am using the term "culture" in the anthropological sense. The term is so broad that it's difficult to give it a single precise definition, but here's one from an intro textbook that I think is useful enough:

As far as whether or not the claim is dubious, I'm almost flummoxed about how to go about providing an argument. The idea is so well established it's just a fundamental part of anthropology. Here's how the cultural anthropology program at Duke describes the field:

Obviously "culture" is not a thing that achieves anything, but because the anthropological definition encompasses all of these products of human social life, and because there is literally no human existence which is not social existence, it is mainly through the fashioning of all those cultural phenomena mentioned above that humans achieve the goals you mentioned before. Some of the goals you mentioned (family, trade) are explicitly social.

Again, part of my point is that the universal importance of culture to human existence is evident just by looking at the world, which is why I've prodded you so many times to try to think of even one example of human beings living in the kind of freedom you take to be natural.

Finally, I think two chapters from Geertz's seminal work on cultural anthropology might be interesting to you:

The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man

The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind (part II in particular). A more recent discussion of this idea can be found here.

Obviously I disagree with your claim that progressives are trying to destroy western culture, but both of these questions seem completely tangential to this discussion. They are interesting for sure, but have nothing to do with the topic of this thread so I'm going to skip them.

It's sort of funny, a big part of the reason I jumped in to this thread to pursue this line of argumentation is that I was intrigued by the apparent similarities between your style of debate here and in the other thread about morality. And the above sums it up. Your style seems to be to just assume your conclusion and then balk when challenged to actually argue for it.

You are of course free to assume whatever you want without evidence, but then I feel like you should be far more humble than you are about the state of your own knowledge, and far less derisive of others. Basically it's strange how willing you are to deride OrP's explanation as mere "opinionating" and then turn around and declare that you don't need evidence to support your own opinions.

(emphasis mine)

This is hardly a counter-argument, since the entire point I was making is that your theory is purely an idealization that doesn't exist in nature. Again, I think you can claim that such rights exist if you want (on a supernatural basis, perhaps), but you can't reasonably claim that they are natural without some evidence that they exist in nature. A political ideal expressed in a definition is not evidence.

I do not see how this relates to what I've said.

I don't see how this gets you anywhere with regard to the concept of natural rights.

The main principle I'm assuming is empiricism, however you should also consider the rationality of abductive arguments. I don't just assume the value of empiricism on an ad hoc basis. I adopt it as an axiom because of its many demonstrated successes. I would argue that if any principle of knowledge is justified by an appeal to human nature, then empiricism should be it, just given the structure of human faculties of perception and reasoning.

I think the main difficulty would be the scope of the project, but in the other thread more than a few people have already done something like this, arguing from a similar stance as I have here. I would agree that I could never realistically offer a comprehensive assessment here -- the world is too complex -- but it seems I could easily offer more than you are able to do, and in fact I already have.

Ya I took anthropology in university. Culture is literally too broad a category to get into. I think reason and science are far better at determining 'well being' or whatever you want to classify morality today as than culture. Obviously the weight a culture gives to the importance of these things is part of the culture itself, but I digress.

It really doesn't matter. You're nitpicking at well established philosophical theories that some of the most brilliant legal minds in the world subscribe to. So your insinuation that I'm way off base is kind of silly. You're wrong about the tenuousness of my position, and I know it because those people are way smarter than you or me. I'm either bad at explaining it or you're being deliberately stubborn. Regardless, it's taking too much effort to get through to you on it.








I dont really know why you think it's a problem. You should kind of expect internally consistent, ground-up positions to share the same characteristics. You seem to think that not being able to justify axiomatic starting points is a flaw in someone's argument or that by saying something is self evident that I'm balking at arguing for it, but you're wrong. I dont need to justify the axioms my position is based upon. No one does. It's sort of the cornerstone of reasoning.

I mean its simply not an opinion that the declaration of independence is referring to natural law. It's an obvious fact. We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal and endowed
by their creator with certain inalienable rights.

The same people that wrote that document wrote the constitution. Did they change from being natural law theorists to legal positivists in the 11 years between the two? I think not. Neither did Lincoln.


I've given you the argument a dozen times and you even agreed with the reasoning but didn't like my not including culture. I mean, anarchy is a political concept. It doesn't need to exist anywhere in reality to be conceptually a valid thing. The same goes for the basis of reasoning about law. I dont know why you think that abstract reasoning is inapplicable. It's literally the purest form of reasoning there is. A tesseract doesn't exist in reality but it's still a valid, albeit abstract, mathematical concept. The same goes for legion other things in mathematics. Maybe you dont consider it as empirically rigorous as sociology or anthropology? Lol. Neither of those are really empirical anyway, nor does empiricism have anywhere near a monopoly on truth.

This is a fallacious appeal to authority. There's no doubt of his intelligence, but plenty of brilliant people have held views that turned out to be false. Locke's conception of the "state of nature" is one example. He simply lacked knowledge available to more modern anthropologists.

The other problem you seem to have is with following an argument. We aren't debating whether or not the declaration of independence refers to the idea of natural law. We're debating whether natural rights exists, and specifically whether a "state of nature" exists as you (and Locke) describe it. I already said earlier that there was no doubt that the concept of natural rights are important to the intellectual history of the constitution, but what you are doing here is like arguing that God exists because the Bible refers to him. The Declaration refers to natural rights. Those rights don't actually exist. The debate is about the second claim, not the first.

It's clear you didn't understand what I wrote, because this is a very bad summary of it.

I have not argued that anarchy is not a valid (coherent) concept, nor against abstract reasoning in general. Again, it's clear you're not making much of an attempt to understand the arguments being made.

Mathematics isn't empirical. Nor is logic. Sociology and anthropology, insofar as they are sciences, are. This does not make the former less valuable than the sciences, of course. But there's an obvious reason why sciences emphasize empiricism while math doesn't, that being that the sciences are trying to answer questions about the natural world and mathematicians and logicians (qua mathematicians and logicians) are not. Since you are making claims about the natural world (the state of nature, a point you still seem not to be able to grasp), it is reasonable to look for empirical evidence that such a state exists in nature.

Locke, fwiw, does attempt to provide empirical evidence for his conception of the state of nature. He writes:

The problem with his argument is that the people he is referring to do not exist in a state where they have "perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of Nature, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man." (2.4) The claim that such people exist in the "state of nature" as he has defined it is plainly false, no matter how brilliant he was.

Finally, I've said a few times now that this argument about the state being "natural" is avoidable if you simply disclaim it as a state "of nature." You hinted at doing so when you said you could derive what you are calling natural rights from the existence of a creator. I think your attempts to do so will have other problems, but they would be different problems at least. I suspect in both cases you'll just continue to assume the conclusion you should be arguing for.

Anthropology is about as empirical as philosophy is.



Ah ok I see your problem now. That is what you are trying to debate. What we are actually debating is what the United states was intended to be as laid out in the constitution, how certain statutes may be unconstitutional, and who has a right to what according to that document. It does not matter whether or not natural rights actually exist. What matters is the founders thought they did exist when they created the country and wrote the constitution, and that intention has not evaporated when studying specific cases. The constitution says you have natural rights and laws are, in reality, written with that in mind and interpreted with that in mind. Whether or not they actually exist is irrelevant to the content of the conversation. The founders didn't justify their existence in the DoI, and neither do I.


Neither subject is a science. I'm not going to denigrate them further, because I dont want to insult you personally. They're about as empirical as philosophy.

I don't consider it "trampling" any time an individual ends up in court. I'm really sorry that they're so bigoted that they would literally rather go to the highest court in the land than make some money selling a cake but I don't value their immaterial loss as much as I value the tangible benefits of allowing people access to goods and services.

In the real word, allowing the former has only led to a worse situation for society, whereas the latter has led to immeasurable improvement.

If you're only figuring this out now, it seems like you should be less aggressive in your tone, and more apologetic, because you could have known it 40 posts ago if you read my posts.

Of course it's relevant. You're arguing against public accommodation laws on the grounds that they violate natural rights (e.g. anti-discrimination laws infringe the right to freedom of association, which you assert as a natural right, also here and elsewhere). It's a pretty significant blow to the argument you've been making so far in this thread if natural rights don't exist.

You can retreat to arguing that public accommodation laws are only unconstitutional instead, giving up on the idea of natural rights, but then you'd have to grapple with the fact that such laws have been upheld as constitutional, which is why you argued from your concept of natural rights to begin with. Or, like I said, you can try to sustain an argument for natural rights on some other grounds. In either case, you can't reasonably tell us that it's irrelevant to your argument if natural rights don't exist.

I'm particularly amused by this claim at the moment because in the next day or two my co-authors and I will be submitting an empirical sociological study of Christian deconversion for publication. Although, perhaps it won't be accepted. Like many sciences, there exists in cultural anthropology and sociology both theoretical work and empirical work, and the former definitely has a philosophical style, or at least the best of it does imo. But I'd wager that the majority of sociological publications are empirical; in fact the most popular general methodologies seen in American sociology are all quantitative, they are empirical studies of various large datasets.

I've been replying to 4+ people the entire time, and I have never once talked about the empirical evidence for natural rights. You come along, write a post about the anthropological evidence (lol) against the truth of natural rights and think that's what the conversation has been about the whole time? Lol if anyone needs to read and apologize it's you; you are way off base. I've given you the benefit of the doubt and replied to your query about why I think they exist. Insofar as whether or not that argument is true, I really don't care. And I really don't care if you think there is anthropological evidence or sociological evidence against their existence. The concept of natural rights isn't falsifiable (neither is social science though lol). You have to accept it as self-evident which US law does.

However, the legal question of whether or not we have them is settled, because the law of the land says that we have them. The conversation about gay wedding cakes needs to take place with that in mind, which is what I've been doing the whole thread.



Um I have been asserting that the DoI and Constitution assert they exist. Our laws say we have natural rights. I don't need to personally prove that they exist for my argument to be valid, and your demand for such is unfounded.

You're confused.
1) Laws are unconstitutional if they violate the constitution
2) The constitution is essentially about the protection of our natural rights
3) Laws are unconstitutional if they violate our natural rights


Public accomodation laws are not unconstitutional; private accomododation laws are certainly unconstitutional in one sense, but not in another however the latter is extremely flimsy, considering the language says 'between the states.'

I could find no cases challenging the constitutionality of the CRA, but I suspect there is a strong legal case

I'm not confused. The specific laws involved in the Colorado baker case are public accommodation laws. Same with the the general case of the CRA making it illegal to refuse to serve blacks. See for example here:

You've certainly referred to a (private) right to freedom of association but I don't think anyone in this thread has been arguing against such a right for private individuals, and that's not the issue at hand in the Colorado case or for the CRA in general.

Also, given the line you are now taking re: natural rights, I think it might be interesting for you to circle back now to this question:

Oh, also I never claimed that the existence of natural rights has been the topic of the entire thread. I claimed that it's the subject I raised in response to one of your posts. But again, I raised it because it's relevant to your arguments about anti-discrimination law. I mean, I explained what I was doing explicitly, and why.

He is just desperately scrambling for some trigger, so this is just pearls for swine. If he hits a nerve, then he gets his out of jail-card and can quarrel for 3 new pages.

1. Make simplistic and bombastic claim.
2. Misrepresent any disagreement.
3. Lie
4. Insult people to try and get them angry.

Rinse and repeat.

Like, I'm still curious about the time he removed "land" from Locke's quote about how you could own land, and then argued that Locke did not say you could own land.

I mean, that was pretty low.

I guess that depends on what your definition of the word public is. Even the CRA itself doesn't presume to impose this on private businesses, but businesses that are truly open to the public. It's highly debatable whether or not the business types the act itself lists are 'public.' Let's look at what businesses the CRA considers 'public:'

Ah ok, so this would not apply to bed and breakfasts with less than 5 rooms where the owner lives in the house he is renting out

Wedding Cake shops need not apply?

so any sub business physically located within the businesses the previous sections covered


If one of the businesses covered above is physically located inside of a business not applicable, then it applies to that whole physical location

ie: a 6 room hotel inside of another business, then the business that contains the hotel cannot prevent patrons of the hotel from using the building

Any other business that serves patrons of any of the covered establishments (ie: a private hot dog seller at a baseball game)

I cannot see much good reasoning as to how this applies to private wedding cake shop owners in any way. They are not offering lodging, they are not offering food for consumption on the premises, and they are not offering business to patrons of businesses they are located in. I suspect that any wedding cake shop that was primarily offering public consumption of goods on the premises like cookies or whatever would apply to this act, which in my opinion is silly anyway because different products are different.

In your mind, are any businesses private? Because the CRA itself is very limited in its application. Anything it doesn't cover it does not apply to, which is the majority of businesses.

When I used the phrase "public accommodation law" I was referring to no more and no less than the actual laws in question, as written. I was using it as a technical term rather than making some analytical distinction between public and private business. In Masterpiece specifically, that means (from the same link above):

I suspect you'd have to look at case law to find the exact boundaries of public accommodation law in the CRA, I don't know what they are, and I don't think the S.C. in this particular case offered any opinion on the constitutionality of the CADA, which may or may not use broader language than the CRA.

Also, out of interest, I think an argument for the legal relevance of "natural rights" may be made from the decision in NAACP v. Alabama (1958) although again I'm ignorant of any subsequent precedent that may be important to reading this ruling. But I think it's at least prima facie reasonable to read the justices' references to "freedom of association" in the ruling as indicating a belief in the legal relevance of a natural right, although they are also careful to ground their decision in finding that right to be protected specifically by the 14th amendment, rather than by appealing to a theory to natural rights. I don't know enough to definitively draw a conclusion, but I think it's interesting to read.

Yes, and as far as I know because the Colorado Act went further than the CRA in its scope by redefining public accomodation in a more broad way, that law and the state court was ruled to be infringing upon the rights of the cake baker in upholding that law. The CRA does not include this definition: "A “place of public accommodation” includes any “place of business engaged in any sales to the public," and rightly so, because it directly infringes upon the rights protected in the 1st amendment.



I think that was pretty much what the decision was about, wasn't it? That the highest court in colorado violated his freedom of expression by upholding this law.

The 14th amendment is about the equal application of all the other amendments though, so in reality it's about the 1st amendment and how it was violated via the 14th.

Referring back to my previous comments about arguments from constitutionality vs arguments from natural rights, I think there is still an important legally relevant detail though, even accepting the argument that the NAACP case refers to natural rights in a relevant way. You tend to assert natural rights as absolute and inviolable, but constitutional jurisprudence does not appear to view the right to freedom of association as absolute. There are any number of constitutionally upheld limitations on this right, and those limitations are grounded in rulings that find the limits to be justified by legitimate interests of society and the state.

I think this way of balancing rights with legitimate state interests speaks against a concept of "natural rights" being legally relevant in the way you need it to be, at least. It is a concept of rights that is much closer to OrP's. Basically it is a concept that moves the argument about laws like CADA to one that must take into account the relative costs and benefits of a given law, in some sense. So that in the opinion the justices write:

Under your view of natural rights, there can be no question of "sufficient justification" for infringing those rights, but for the court there clearly is.

Basically, much like OrP, my defense of anti-discrimination law in general is that its benefits to society vastly outweigh the burdens or limits it places on the right to free association, regardless of how that right is construed. My understanding of legal standards like "strict scrutiny" in relation to the first amendment is that this kind of evaluation is common, and it at least speaks against a maximalist version of your view of natural rights as constitutionally relevant, I think.

No, that's wrong. The ruling is here.

They did not hold that the law violated his rights, they held that the civil rights commission in Colorado violated his rights by their actions. The SC didn't strike down the law or rule on the larger question at all. Cf. here, or you can find other analyses elsewhere.

From the ruling itself:

It's careful to distinguish between the illegality of the commission's handling of the case while avoiding the substantive question of the constitutionality of the law or similar laws.

Via the commerce clause, or some other limitations? Because that justification is flimsy as hell. The federal government should be involved in no way in intrastate commerce.

No legal framework could possibly do what you're suggesting, nor should it, because it depends on ones personal definition of 'cost and benefit.' A lot of people in this thread couldn't care less about religious liberty, and some (Bladesman) have even argued that directly infringing upon religious liberty so long as it helps gays is totally fine by him. Rather, the law and its enforcement needs to operate from principles that apply to everyone equally, otherwise the society we live in will cease to exist. As someone who has studied history the erasure of their 'progress' in an out and out physical contest with hateful gun totin bigots wouldn't end well for softie leftists. The right wing in the US is simply not willing to tolerate perceived infringements upon its (somewhat valid) conception of the country it lives in anymore, and I highly suggest both sides come to a fair and reasoned agreement about the status of rights for everyone before it erupts into 1861 part deux. Both sides are refusing to listen to each other and this thread is a microcosm (people getting put on ignore, slandered as bigots and racists, called insulting despite no personal insults being made) of what is happening at large. Attempting to silence people or refusing to engage with someone you disagree with is a hallmark of someone with a weak position. The content of your argument should be the thing engaged with. The stronger argument wins.


With that said, I have highly enjoyed this dialogue, and I thank you and OrP specifically for not being *******s, and I apologize if I was in any way an ******* towards either of you (I don't think I was).

In what way? Via the CRA, or others? Because the CRA isn't really about personal discrimination at all from my reading of it, it's mostly a physical access legislation.

Right ok, the decision rendered that. Masterpiece did in fact appeal the CADA based on infringement of its 1st amendment rights though, the court just didn't speak to it.

I think the CRA specifically was upheld on the basis of arguments that reference the commerce clause. I'm not familiar enough to answer. I was considering the idea of natural rights more broadly than anti-discrimination law though, at least insofar as I was discussing limitations to rights. The strict scrutiny standard is applied in a variety of contexts not limited to laws regulating commerce (for example it is applied to restrictions on speech).

Well, this is part of what judges do. Again, I'm not an expert but there is a pretty long history of jurisprudence that lays out how costs/benefits/burdens etc. are measured in various legal contexts, including what "compelling government interest" means in the application of strict scrutiny standards.

I think you're probably over-extrapolating from his comments to conclude that he is entirely ambivalent to religious liberty, but I could be wrong.

Yes, but one of the lessons of the Civil Rights era, IMO, is that the equal protection of the law is meaningless if you tolerate the replacement of de jure discrimination with merely de facto discrimination on a near-universal basis. That makes equality a legal fiction with little relationship to actual freedom. I think this problem becomes a lot clearer when you recognize the necessarily social context of law and politics, which is a big part of my objection to the way you go about conceiving natural rights.

Basically, natural rights theorists usually try to do deal in some way with the problems that arise from social life by appealing to a limit on natural rights such that I cannot exercise my rights in a way that infringes yours, and that's not an unreasonable way to try to address the problem. But there's an obvious "tragedy of the commons" situation if you try to apply your view of individual rights to the situation of racial discrimination in Alabama in 1960. No matter how much someone tries to argue that individual whites' exercise of "free association" rights did not infringe on blacks' ability to pursue "life, liberty, and happiness", it's very very clear that in practice it enormously impaired the ability of blacks to actually achieve those goals. That's not even counting actual government-sanctioned direct discrimination, of course. The error is mostly in ignoring the enormous importance of social norms and structures (outside of the law) to human existence, which is precisely my criticism of Locke's conception of the "State of Nature". No one can really be free in a society in which the vast majority of other members treat them as second-class, no matter what the law defines as equal protection.

You can take it for whatever you think it's worth, but your style often comes across as dismissive, hostile, and insulting, and I have found you enormously frustrating to argue with on at least a few occasions. But I appreciate what you wrote here. I like arguing about ideas, I'm generally willing to tolerate a certain amount of heat if I think the argument is interesting :P

I mean in general. As far as I can tell your view of natural rights would not allow for a court to limit a natural right on the basis of a "compelling government interest". This would seem to apply as much to 1st amendment cases as anti-discrimination cases. I could be wrong about your view, but I'm inferring it from the fact that you think the argument is settled entirely by appealing to a natural right. If the law could properly limit natural rights, then that wouldn't be sufficient to settle the question.

It was clear back when I first interjected that he had no interest in arguing in bad faith.

He also added a word to a post of mine and then claimed it was nonsense without his edit. We never got a response when I explained the sentence to him.

At least there was some small chance he'd get away with editing Locke's words. How he thought I'd miss him changing my own is beyond me.

One more random thing I noticed the other day but hadn't gotten around to commenting on, then I'll stop spamming.

I think it's interesting that in Locke's Two Treatises on Government he seems to suggest that in the formation of a society members voluntarily give up some of their natural rights, which is interesting insofar as it would indicate a conception of natural rights that is also compatible with the idea of limits on those rights. He writes:

I disagree that part of what judges do is evaluate the cost/benefits of interpretations of the law. At the least they should not be doing this. Evaluating statutes should always be done in light of the supreme law, the constitution, and whether or not those statutes are legal in that sense.



I'm going with what I have to work on. He refuses to elaborate his position.



I agree with most of this from a moral point of view, but not a legal one. One of the prices of freedom is living with certain ****ty situations that you dont agree with. Imposing upon state sanctioned discrimination is not only fine but in my opinion obligatory. That does not extend to private people or businesses, and indeed it cant if you expect to live in a free society. Indeed the free market taking care of racist practices is one of the points of view mentioned in that Cornell article, as well as an opposing view that businesses will not self-correct. The point is that businesses don't have to, and should not be forced to, hold themselves to anyboarticular ideological line beyond the law. The constitution is about how the government deals with its citizens, not how citizens deal with each other. Interpersonal discrimination is not a crime, nor should it be.

I dont necessarily disagree with this, but its curious because this is the exact same line of argumentation that unrepentant white supremacists use to argue for non diverse societies.



I take that as a compliment. Are you willing to be consistent in that evaluation by judging other people's styles, such as tame_deuces and lagtight, who have slandered me and my views since the thread began?



I think its settled by looking at the constitution. There is no doubt that the CADA oversteps its bounds and actually infringes on freedom of all kinds of association and expression rights protected by the 1st amendment. I think personally the definition of publicly offered goods in the CRA is too broadly interpreted by the left.

Nevertheless it's clear that it is part of what they do, and has been for quite a long time. I referred to "strict scrutiny" tests before, but consider a specific example: the constitutionality of laws against libel and slander. I think this example is useful because the constitutionality of such laws can be seen as marking out a limit to the right to free speech. This article is helpful. The authors write:

If you read the parts of the decision in this case that the article highlights, you can see that the justices do not just assert flatly that the facts of the case lead to a violation of some rigidly defined right to freedom of the press. They expressly consider the effects of both the prior precedent and a revision to it that modifies the standards for libel in cases involving elected officials:

Obviously this case expanded the scope of free speech rights in relation to libel law, but it's the reasoning of the judgement that I'm highlighting, and that kind of reasoning is not unique to this case. As I said, the entire legal principle of differing levels of scrutiny fundamentally implies making these kinds of judgements.

It seems a bit perverse to me to call this the price of freedom when the price is borne entirely by the same people who are rendered less free. It sounds a lot more like oppression than freedom.

I think society after the passage of the CRA is meaningful more free for African Americans, and that freedom comes at negligible costs to anyone else.

Not really. White supremacists add an additional premise: the inevitability of their own racism. They also hold that it's both natural and desirable for whites to oppress other races.

It's not a compliment. When I say "frustrating" I don't mean in the sense of it being challenging because you argue well. I mean in the sense that you are often obnoxious, ignorant, and argue in apparent bad faith.

I only engaged in this meta-discussion about your posting because you brought it up. I'm not too interested in evaluating everyone's posting. Although I think you are confused about lagtight, as far as I can tell he basically agrees with your position.

If there were no doubt it seems like the Supreme Court would have actually struck the law down.