I made no slippery slope argument, and I don't remember seeing anyone else make one either. I hate all discrimination.

I hate discrimination based on religion even more than other kinds, because I hate religion; I believe it to be a great evil in society. I think Hitchens and Dawkins and Harris didn't go far enough, religious beliefs are the cause of the majority of evil in the world, and of very little good.

I don't care if they're freely chose it or not within the context of picking a babysitter.

I was talking about general employment by companies, not your personal hiring of a babysitter for your child.

Do you think someone personally choosing a babysitter for his child should be forced to not discriminate against blacks or homosexuals? If so, how should this be implemented?

All parts of your posts involving the disgusting comparison between homosexuals and pedophiles have been ignored.

This just seems silly. Your view is that if we legally protect a historically oppressed group of people from discrimination, that doing so doesn't help that group. But it DOES hurt other groups? Gittouttahere.

This completely invalidates your position. Your position is the law does NOT affect that protected class, it only hurts everyone else. But here you are saying the bigots would switch, instead of firing gay people they would fire someone else to punish them instead. It's a ridiculous position, but note how it implicitly accepts that laws to protect gay people WOULD actually protect gay people.

I really don't care about your counterfactuals. Nobody made that a law or would argue for it.

Then in the context of any employment that involves a high degree of trust around children.

You are arguing for a similar law regarding sexual preference.

That seems fair. But I wouldn't want to see them not be able to get an office or factory job, etc.

And this is why I was calling the whole line of discussion dishonest and irritating from the beginning. At least we haven't had to go down the rabbit hole further.

I don't understand exactly what you're referring to, but I haven't been dishonest or disingenuous in the least, and I just agreed with you for the first time.

I guess you don't like that I feel sympathy for those that are haunted by demons that neither of us truly understand but I can only imagine to lead to a terrible life, even without being externally punished to boot.

No, it's nothing to do with sympathy for anyone. It's that I don't believe that anyone who'd thought about this for five seconds couldn't figure out that employment rights for homosexuals and paedophiles should be very different. And after playing this long, tiring game, you relinquish that point immediately. So why have we had to go down this distasteful line at all?

This technique of yours of ignoring most of my arguments - not coincidentally the ones that destroy your position - and then just doing a silly pushback on one line is getting tedious.

But no, protecting LGBT people is not analogous to protecting only african amerians and not all races. The mistake you keep making is that our analysis has to be deeper than just "is it a category". Yes black people, and short people, and gay people, and people who post on the internet are all "categories". Some of them are subsets of larger categories. But when we look at what "categories" we want to enumerated as protected legal classes, the analysis is more than just "is it a category".

The reason we might want to protect sexual orientation is because there is a specific, egregious historical basis for widespread discrimination against gay people. It has major social impact. We don't need to wax philosophical about categories vs a subcategories to make a concrete step forward.

Don't know what I relinquished. Not many regular jobs involve being alone with children.

Okay, this is just completely ****ing obtuse.

I wasn't thinking of jobs involving children when I said I didn't think they should have workforce discrimination. That's not a large part of the workforce, but you are correct, I can see that you were right about that and I said so. I was never meaning to be obtuse.

I think my viewpoint is different from most on here because, despite being a hetero cis white male, I feel I have suffered from much discrimination in my life, for reasons occasionally owing to being a member of one of those classes, but more often for reasons not easily classified.

This makes me very sensitive to the rights of those in extreme minorities which are just as deserving but whom there is no way to legally protect. I would prefer to see a world where no on suffers from unfair discrimination but assume that can never realistically happen.

And by the way, I'm no sexist, racist, or homophobe. My best friend is a woman (very overweight and suffering extra discrimination because of that). My next best friend is the mixed race man (who basically looks black) mentioned above. My next best after that is a gay male. I think I have a pretty good view of what it's like in the current environment to be a member of one of those groups, at least as good as possible without actually being a member of any of those groups. Despite the fact that they have all suffered some significant discrimination, I really don't think any of them have suffered any more than I have. I plan to soon ask them about that however, and find out what they think.

Lol, did you really just play the "I have a black friend" card? I mean, surely you must know that this is a like classic trope of racists everywhere to defend themselves by saying they have a black friend, even if that doesn't diminish - one iota - their racism? Kinda would have thought you would be self aware enough to avoid that.

But since you are going to ask them about the discrimination they have suffered, why don't you ask them if they think it should be legal to be fired for being a woman, black, or gay? Or to refuse to give them a room at the hotel for that?

Nobody is proposing these laws end all discrimination. Nowhere close. Maybe your white ass really has been discriminated against an extraordinary amount (although, again, you can't be legally fired for being white or denied the provision of public goods for it). But that doesn't mean we shouldn't still identify major classes in society of historically oppressed people and take bare minimum laws to restrict this kind of discrimination. That you think you have been discriminated against just isn't an argument against the proposition that people shouldn't be able to be fired based on their race. It's a total nonsequitur.

You paint yourself as this guy who has suffered all this discrimination yourself, and is just there on the lookout for "extreme minorities" deserving of protection. How noble. But you are saying these things to argue about DENYING protections against major groups of people who have been historically oppressed!

Perhaps I made a mistake by disengaging from your constant comparison to pedophiles given the horrific history of homophobic comparisons between gays and pedophiles - a history you seem either ignorant or insensitive to. Because now you are talking about the "extreme minority" who are "just as deserving". It isn't a huge leap to guess who you are imagining.

You keep bringing up versions of this "I would prefer a world where no one suffers" point as if it is somehow virtuous. But it is totally illogical. Just because that is completely impossible doesn't mean we shouldn't take practical steps today to reduce discrimination by passing some protections for a major group that has been historically oppressed. That it doesn't fix every problem ever just isn't an argument.

The problem the 'defenders' have in the thread is not that they're arguing for anti-discrimination laws, it's that they fail to justify the line they are drawing around what groups anti-discrimination laws are supposed to protect. They also fail to make an argument that these laws actually protect these groups, or that they don't open up discrimination to other groups. They fail to justify their position.

Whenever someone brings up that fact, no counterargument is made. In place, either fingers in the ears or name calling implying discrimination itself occurs. This proves the point I made. When you advocate for special status or special protections for a group, you are assuming discrimination. It becomes the base assumption of every discussion you now have about the group, because that is how you defined the group in the first place. This is dangerous, as I pointed out, because now every comment must be viewed through that lens. Find a comment you don't like or can't argue against? It's discrimination. Someone makes an analogy that you don't understand? Racism or homophobia. Someone hits a nerve and makes you look like a fool? They're disgusting bigots. This is of course absurd, but it is the strategy that has worked for progressives for the last 50 years to the effect of widespread and sweeping societal change.

Historically, anti-discrimination laws only applied to monopolies. The legal thought was that markets should be free, and freedom of association for both customers and owners was sacrosanct, except in the case of monopolies. Companies that held a vast market share and that had the ability to discriminate against whoever they wished literally left people out in the cold. This is clearly injustice and the remedy was to ban discrimination of any kind by social services and/or companies that held market monopolies. This of course, makes perfect sense. A customer refused service is not injured if he/she can go to another business to get what they need. If that business is the only business, then they are clearly injured.

The Civil Rights Act changed all this. Because of deeply rooted racism in some states, the Civil Rights Act was designed with the strategy to deracinate the system that held this discrimination in place. Not only were businesses preventing blacks from buying goods and services, the communities themselves were preventing 'Northern' companies from coming in and competing with them. By forcing businesses to allow blacks, companies that now already allowed blacks could no longer be prevented from competing with the companies that didn't, and the communities that enforced this systemic racism, often with violence and boycotts, were no longer able to enforce the system. Lawmakers didn't want to take away the businesses free association rights, and their target wasn't all businesses that discriminated or all groups, but felt the only way to topple the system of racism in the south was to create a level playing field among competing businesses. The strategy worked. A lot of racist business owners went bankrupt, the system of community enforced racism was destroyed, and blacks now enjoy the same rights they should have always enjoyed.

This, however, presented a problem. The strategy of allowing non-discriminating businesses to compete with discriminating ones by forcing racist communities to remove race restrictions removed all freedom of association rights of all businesses, in perpetuity. This opened the door for 50 years of aggressive special status seeking for other groups, to astounding success.

Is taking away the right of businesses to freely associate really correct though? How is it justified? Why, as a business owner, can't I choose who I trade my goods and services with? If I can discriminate who I sell a gun or a chainsaw to, why not a cake? Why must I sell to everyone? It is, after all, my business. If I want to limit my business by cutting my customer base by 87% and serve only black people, why can't I? Why can't I hire only men and run my business into the ground? How is that fair? Aside from that, if this applies to businesses why doesn't it apply to customers? If I choose to only get haircuts at the black owned salon, am I discriminating against white barbers?

Of course, these types of situations happen all the time. There are black only businesses. There is Women's Only Fitness. That gay wedding planner I emailed will not do straight weddings....I checked. I've already given the reason: these groups are not protected from discrimination as my moral and intellectual superiors in the thread have suggested. They are special status groups with more rights than the rest of us, not less. They aren't just protected from discrimination, they're protected to discriminate.

Stop with the special pleading and cherry picking and drawing arbitrary lines around the group(s) you've chosen to virtue signal for. If you want a fair and just society, then argue for one.

Maybe if I thought you were arguing in good faith I would, but frankly the comparisons and some of the comments you've made have made me question that.

This is like your moral debate, or our brief argument on evidence, where essentially you claim that everyone has to collapse into some form of nihilism or extreme scepticism, and when people tell you that that isn't as interesting a problem as you want it to be you strut around as though it's a victory.

You and uke don't get to just argue in bad faith, call people names and strut around like it's a victory. It is an interesting problem that businesses have no right to free association, don't you think? You say they do, but that's the substance of most of both of your posts: asserting things without any real argumentation or substance, despite heavily contradicting evidence, and expecting it to stick. Not only do you do that, when others actually make reasonable points you either ignore it completely, or have the gumption to call the other person names or monikers like homophobic, ignorant, etc. It's obviously clear you and especially he/she are completely oblivious to the history of this issue, the context in which it actually resides, the mechanisms by which your claimed justice is being enforced, or potential problems that are clearly arising (religious liberty) from instantiating special status for some groups and not others. Your dismissive and ignorant replies are not fooling anyone into accepting a position they haven't already accepted, and they weaken your position instead of strengthen it. I suspect you don't care, because it's been clear from the beginning you're not focused on actual injustice and fairness but simply have an uninformed, one-sided opinion. You're free to prove me wrong by actually addressing the points that are brought up, but I don't expect you will.

Cite.

You are arguing that people shouldnt be discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation, correct?

If that is what you are arguing, then pedophilia also falls within that category, but you dont seem to extend protection to them. So, either your argument is not on the basis of sexual orientation, or else there is some other criteria that you are not citing that you include in your argument.

This does NOT mean that anyone thinks pedophiles and LGBT are the same ( whatever that means). You are the one claiming sexual orientation is a protected category. Does this mean all sexual orientations? If not, why not?

By discrimination, I am talking about being sacked, refused service, refused employment, and so on. Disallowing pedophiles from working with children is not discrimination, in the same way that if a gay person had committed a bank robbery, they would then not be employed by financial institutions, and that wouldnt be discrimination.

This is just semantics.

The answer to the question is yes with a but. For all normal purposes it suffices to simply say "Yes", because everyone understand what I'm talking about. For this conversation, no, it's obviously not that ****ing simple as "anything that can be described as a sexual orientation".

This isn't some huge "Gotcha!" moment. This is boring word games.

how is it semantics? Either your argument is about sexual orientation, or it isnt.

the "but" is exactly what I am asking about. This is the " other criteria that you are not citing that you include in your argument"

So what is the "but"?