Even if we say the legislation is incidental, and that is was the process of the civil rights era, the protest, the recognition, the acceptance, that made the difference, isn't that still reason enough to do the same for other groups?

I have no idea why you think this. We've seen a dramatic reduction in bigotry and discrimination over the last 20 years, why on earth do you think it only shifts? As we've become more accepting of LGBT people, who is the other group laws around the country and internationally have directed the harm towards?

If you were only arguing that legal protections had small effects, I would disagree, but I would at least understand that argument. The CRA era was indeed a multi-faceted improvement and it it is admittedly hard to decide how much of a role individual components like just the laws played. I think you really are downplaying them, but ok. Maybe they are just symbolic (which still matters imo). But to argue that any effect they have can't possibly protect the people legally protected but instead the effect all is in hurting other people? It's just such a convoluted argument.

I think it could shift in individual bigots (obviously this is just a theory). I think the main reason for the dramatic reduction in the private sector is bigots dying off (or retiring which makes them less important) and younger less bigoted people being born and taking positions of power.

Well why don't you elaborate on your "theory". Suppose I'm a homophobe. But now I can't fire you for being gay. You think that I would "shift" my animus and take up being, oh I dunno, a hater of short people instead and will now fire a short person at my office.

Why on earth would you think this is remotely realistic. I can see the homophobe not firing the gay person now because it is illegal. That sounds amazing and a huge reason to do it. But you seem to believe both that a) it doesn't help the gay people and b) it would "shift" somehow...that now the person fires the short person or whoever their animus "shifts" to.

I'm ignorant on this point as well, but i would be pretty shocked if this actually respected the literature on discrimination, that it "shifts" from group to group the way you seem to believe.

No, in this case I think you'll likely just fire your gay employee and come up with some other plausible reason for doing it. Also a small chance that you won't be able to figure out a plausible reason, and working with him will cause you so much frustration that you'll eventually go shoot up a gay club.
Or you might just go home and beat up your wife and kiss.

As I said, it is just my theory. But it seems to me that bigots are full of hatred they will get out one way or another, and that laws don't make them hate any less.

The law of conservation of hatred: The total amount of hatred in a closed system remains constant.

I realize you're mocking me, but I still this.

Can't possibly pass laws protecting gay people, think of the women and children that will get beat up by it by the homophobes! Note, as mentioned before, that you contradict yourself even in your made up example. In that example, the protections DID protect the gay person's job. Yes, you've made up the wife and kids bit because #arguing but you seem to agree some percentage of the time it actually is making a positive impact on the gay employee who now gets to keep their job.

Your "theory" just doesn't make sense. There isn't a fixed amount of hatred. If it is harder for me to discriminate against gays my religion says are an abomination, I don't suddenly develop and animus against red heads.

Or why not take a sort of +EV view. Maybe you are right, and protecting gay people accomplishes nothing. Maybe it is just a feel good symbolic victory where gay teens contemplating suicide can feel a tad more accepted by society knowing they can't be refused work or goods for being gay. Under your view, nothing really gained or lossed in any significance and any changes are neutral EV as hatred is fixed. But what if I'm right, and it does make bend the needle a bit, and reduce discrimination a bit. If we can't be sure who is correct, doesn't it make sense to gamble on mine as it is the +EV route?

Missed this the first time. Dude, this is pretty ****ing insensitive. Arguing to deny protections to gay people because of gay people being shot? Saying that people getting shot at gay clubs are because of frustration for working with gay people?

The most prominent gay club shooting was an ISIS support whose religion says gay people are an abomination. Not short people. Gay people.

Attitudes likely haven't changed much in the past 20 years. What we hear from sex activists certainly doesn't suggest much has, anyway. I doubt much has changed in terms of actual acceptance of homosexuals. There has been a large amount of bullying, forced acceptance and using the government as a club to enforce opinions surrounding homosexuality, and most people are just terrified of saying anything for fear of losing their job, their business, their customers, etc. The revulsion towards homosexual behavior has been closeted, but it's still there.

If that's what you think is 'progress', and it has to be enforced by anti-discrimination legislation and the government, just lol.

Come on, it's not like I'm actively lobbying against protected status for gays. I don't have any say in the matter anyway. Realistically, its passage wouldn't particularly bother me. I just think that in theory giving some classes of people more protection than others isn't fair, and it probably doesn't work very well anyway.

Won‘t somebody think of the fat,ugly nazi pedophile midgets?

Sounds good enough for now.

Let's say I grant your premise that giving some classes of people more protection isn't fair. Imagine we live in a world where some class of people are treated, not by the law, but by society, in an extremely unfair and prejudiced manner. Grant me the premise that anti-discrimination laws like the CRA can ameliorate some of this social unfairness. Do you think it would then be justified on overall fairness grounds for the government to pass a CRA-type bill to protect this class if the social unfairness removed by this bill was greater than the unfairness in government action caused by this bill?

Sorry I've been slow to respond.

Thanks for the link, I read it and employment discrimination against homosexuals is more prevalent than I had realized (at least, during the time studied). I don't regard laws against employment discrimination as a bedrock principle of western liberal democracy (although they are especially important to the Democratic Party due to the Civil Rights movement). Rather, I view them as an expansion of those liberal democratic principles in a more social democratic direction, which is only a branch of western liberal democracy. I generally favor more liberal labor laws both as a matter of freedom and because they are economically beneficial. Some exceptions could be justified if the discrimination they are meant to alleviate is sufficiently harmful, as with the Civil Rights Act.

I will point out here that while, as pointed out in the UCLA study, LGBT people do face a lot of employment discrimination, on average gay men and women outearn straight men and women in comparable situations (although it looks like not as many gay men are employed, so that might be an effect of discrimination). I'm sure there are some distributional issues here, but that doesn't look to me like a large aggregate harm. For comparison, in 1968, black households averaged 27K annually compared to a national median of nearly 44.9K.

Our values are central to our self-identity. Thus, laws that go against our values can threaten our integrity of self in a way that a dispute about eg tax policy generally won't. This can create resentment and an oppositional attitude towards government. This is one of the reasons why activities relating most closely to our values, eg religious and artistic ones, get special protections in the US Constitution. I think this same principle should incline us towards voters having more direct say, especially in how it affects them directly, on laws that impinge most directly on their values.

I'm not surprised at all that gay people earn more than straight ones. That is how it has been in my anecdotal experience, but I was afraid to mention that earlier. IMO gays are certainly not the most discriminated against class of people who are currently not protected by laws.

I think you're wrong to claim that attitudes likely haven't changed much. 20 years is long enough for somewhat substantial changes to have occurred. And even though you may doubt the evidence, the evidence does point towards there being changes.

But I think you're right to think that the amount of change could be overstated. If anything, the level of racial animus (specifically black-white animus) that we are can still see today shows us that there are threads of resentment that have been growing in some areas (mostly racially homogeneous ones), and it's not unreasonable to expect that this could manifest itself in another domain as well.

The distinction is that, despite the continued existence of racial animus, the actual quantity of it has certainly diminished in the last 50 years. It's just that for some, the intensity has increased. I think the same phenomenon is true of the attitudes towards homosexuality. The number of people who are accepting is almost certainly up from where it was, but there are some for whom that general acceptance feels more intense because they are feeling increasingly marginalized as the number of people who share their perspective diminishes. This can lead to perceptions that may not be fully in alignment with reality (on both sides and in both directions).

The study I linked to covers 2012-15, but most studies covering earlier times showed gay men earning less than straight men.

The shift in attitude towards gays over the last 20 years is significant. I've seen it change from being mainstream to be openly homophobic to mainstream to be pro-gay marriage.

Hi, uke_master.

Generally, I believe that only the government can be guilty of discrimination. If someone owns a business, I believe they should be able to hire or fire for any reason at all. No one has a right or obligation to work for me, ergo I have a right to hire or fire anybody for any reason.

On the other hand, the government has an obligation to serve all of the people equally. Individual people have a right to "free association", but the government is obliged to "associate" equally with everyone.

Since I do believe in so-called "Good Samaritan Laws", I think that a business owner does not have the right to deny an essential service to an individual (like food or shelter). Since I don't think that a wedding cake is an "essential" service, I believe that the baker can deny his cakes to anybody he wants.

I haven't given this a lot of thought (as all the readers here can probably tell ), so I'm sort of "thinking out loud" here. I could easily be persuaded otherwise.

Unlike a lot of other topics, I'm not dogmatic on this one.

I can guess what you would want on top of your wedding cake. As a baker I would deny service for sure!

And I would defend your right to not bake me a cake.

Problem is that all the negative discrimination will just stick around, since it will just cram itself into whatever hiding hole is available.

And a democratic state also has the obligation to protect its law-abiding citizens and their rights.

This is of course is the reasoning behind states like mine, which goes much, much farther than the US in reaching into the personal sphere and private property. A business here can't discriminate protected groups, it is illegal.

And as stated earlier: Does it work? Well, we score higher than the US on international indexes of personal freedom. Freedom is more than a word on paper, it matters very little to have to it in principle if you can't actually experience it.

I understand the US approach and in some ways I like it. Still, you do create a lot of loopholes for your bigots to hide out in. And you did need the civil rights legislation. It doesn't take much of a study of history to realize that. A very big part of your population did not get to enjoy the freedom your constitution promises, because they were being hindered by legal loopholes.

I think the main problem in implementing fairness towards all people has been all the state governments. I think it would be great if we could take away individual state power in pretty much everything with any importance and have the same laws everywhere. Hardly anyone considers themselves to have a state identity anymore, and pretty much everyone I have known for most of my life has lived in more than one state. Our system is antiquated and just causes problems with no positive purpose.

Human rights > State's rights

I always thought it was weird how liberals think laws prevent crime. Laws in fact, define crime. It's up to the justice system to punish people who break the law; laws and punishments are rarely a deterrent. So of course you can write a million laws and prejudicial attitudes will still not go away.

Unless they're business owners? Why don't business owners have rights of free association and freedom to trade with who they want? Anti-discrimination laws protecting access to publicly offered goods is fine. I don't believe a private business is offering public goods though. These laws seem to protect against monopolies and state-enforced restricted access (monopoly) as in the case of southern communities pre-1970.


Of course protected groups have more freedom. What do you do if you find yourself in a group that isn't protected though?

Pushing different views into a corner where they can't express themselves through verbalizing or expression will pressure-cook them into actual violence though. History is replete with examples. That's why the 1st amendment is so important.