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Indiana's Pence to sign bill allowing businesses to reject gay customers

Conventions in Indiana? : shock: I've been to conventions all over the world and never one there. I'm not sure how the threats to Pence are going to work...they said Arizona was dead after Brewer signed her bill into law, and tourism hasn't suffered there.

I'll bet SCOTUS will overturn this easily.

I wouldn't bet too much on the Supreme Court of the US. A couple of the Jurists (Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia) are under the strong financial influence of the Koch brothers and are paid handsomely. Justice Samuel Alito is very conservative and allowed foreign money to come into America to possibly influence elections. Justice Anthony Kennedy is usually a swing vote and, for the most part, unreliable as to which way he will go.
 
OK, this is why debating with libertarians is often so pointless. Sure, you're correctly repeating standard libertarian ideology, and it's totally unhinged from reality, unconscionable from a public policy standpoint, and obviously morally repugnant.

Well ok, but it is factual, right? If their condition was not changed how can you claim they were harmed?

Well, to be fair, you wouldn't hold a hospital responsible for withholding life saving care, so obviously this isn't a problem in libertarian land.... :roll:

Your client is mad. I don't see how that is good standing for law.
 
I wouldn't bet too much on the Supreme Court of the US. A couple of the Jurists (Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia) are under the strong financial influence of the Koch brothers and are paid handsomely. Justice Samuel Alito is very conservative and allowed foreign money to come into America to possibly influence elections. Justice Anthony Kennedy is usually a swing vote and, for the most part, unreliable as to which way he will go.
and of course that other tiny detail that there's nothing unconstitutional about the act.
 
The bill needs to be changed so that businesses to reject any customer for any reason they want.

LOL. Maybe they'll need to change their slogan a bit. "Honest-to-Goodness Indiana! Blacks, gays, Jews, Muslims may not be welcome!"
 
LOL. Maybe they'll need to change their slogan a bit. "Honest-to-Goodness Indiana! Blacks, gays, Jews, Muslims may not be welcome!"

The Indiana RFRA largely follows the federal RFRA of 1993, originally presented by (then) Representative Chuck Schumer of New York.
 
Hate is a great powerful tool. It unifies the GOP base. The GOP base hates gays more then they are willing to vote for their own interests. And that's exactly how the anti-gay Republican politicians like it.


And here we go again.

The lefts generic, empty and baseless charges of " hate " and " Bigotry ". Its a silly attempt to bully your way into relevance.

No need for thoughtful diaglogue, just start throwing around vindictives when you dont get your way.

You realize there are consequences to calling everyone who disagrees with you childish names, right ?

It marginalizes your position and cheapens your agenda. No one but a few like minded people agree with you and you just wind up isolating yourself and setting yourself up for a huge backlash from the vast majority of Americans who you've just insulted

I like it. Keep it up !! Good plan !! Lol.
 
Well ok, but it is factual, right? If their condition was not changed how can you claim they were harmed?

1) It's beside the point. Once I reach unconscionable and morally repugnant, I am not all that concerned about factual.

2) I don't agree that there is any moral distinction between deliberately allowing a preventable death and being the cause of a death. I know libertarians like to use the example of the drowning man - do I have an obligation to risk my life to save his? OK, difficult. But if I'm in a boat and all it takes is me throwing out a life preserver and a rope to save a life, and I choose not do, I've caused that death as much as if I threw him overboard.

Your client is mad. I don't see how that is good standing for law.

More than that, I've been harmed.
 
I can appreciate that and it would be relevant if the business we're talking about here was one that involved membership, dues, and other conditions of association. You're local bakery or variety store isn't such a business.

It's true that the Court has distinguished between commercial and expressive association, especially in the Jaycees case, which involved a Minnesota public accommodations law. The involvement of the Jaycees in commerce did play a role in the Court's decision that the state law did not violate the organization's freedom of association by requiring it to admit women. But if you read what the Court said about this, it suggests that the smaller and less strictly involved in commerce an organization is, the stronger its freedom of association argument is likely to be. There are probably quite a few kinds of smaller organizations that are involved in commercial activity to some extent, and yet could not be forced to have dealings with certain people against the will of their members.

It's not hard, either, to think of all sorts of private businesses that involve artistic expression. A state law that defined businesses like that as public accommodations and prohibited them from refusing to enter into contracts with certain specified groups of people could run afoul of a related First Amendment freedom, the freedom of speech--artistic expression is speech for constitutional purposes. The freedom of speech also includes the freedom not to speak, which means laws which compel certain speech will usually be unconstitutional. In Wooley, that was the basis on which the Court held a New Hampshire law under which a man was fined for taping over the state motto "Live Free or Die" on his license plate . He disagreed with that view on religious grounds, and the Court said the government could not compel him to endorse it.

There is also language in Pruneyard Shopping Center, another government-compelled speech case, that strongly suggests a small business owner could not be forced to allow his property to used to promote views with which he disagreed. In effect, that is what the Coeur d'Alene ordinance would have done to the owners of the Hitching Post wedding chapel by requiring them to let their facility be used for same-sex weddings, although I think that was not the basis for the suit challenging the ordinance.
 
Conventions in Indiana? :shock: I've been to conventions all over the world, and never one there. I'm not sure how the threats to Pence are going to work...they said Arizona was dead after Brewer signed her bill into law, and tourism hasn't suffered there.

I'll bet SCOTUS will overturn this easily.

They are actual tourist attractions like the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Indiana isn't much of a tourist attraction unless you like car racing.
 
If I recall correctly, it was the black voters who passed Proposition 8 in the blue state of California. They aren't Republicans.

A common trope, but a misrepresentation of the truth, which is that the common factor among those who voted for prop 8 were church goers. Well known is that a major force behind the passing of prop 8 was the LDS based out of Utah.

Mormon church reports spending $180,000 on Proposition 8 | L.A. NOW | Los Angeles Times

Top officials with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints filed reports today indicating that they donated more than $180,000 in in-kind contributions to Proposition 8, the November ballot initiative that banned same-sex marriage in California.

The contributions included tens of thousands of dollars for expenses such as airline tickets, hotel and restaurant bills and car-rental bills for top church officials such as L. Whitney Clayton, along with $96,849.31 worth of “compensated staff time” for church employees.
The church said the expenditures took place between July 1 and the end of the year. The church’s involvement has been a major issue in the campaign and its aftermath. Individual Mormon families donated millions -- by some estimates more than $20 million -- of their own money to the campaign.



I also don't recall anything in the Republican platform about denying service to gay people.

True, their platform is state and business rights, which just happen to be cited every time a discussion on discrimination against gays come up. The correlation is not inconsistent.

And I also recall earlier in this month when 300+ Republican lawmakers publicly appealed to SCOTUS to recognize same sex marriage nationally.

I don't dispute this, but I'm curious just the same where you got this (again, not disputing it).

Mike Pence doesn't speak for the RNC or the Republican base. Nor do his actions indicate that Republicans "hate gays". He's doing what he thinks is best for his state and to ensure that the religious people in his state aren't forced into commerce against their will.

I really can't relate to this. I make a certain kind of product for my clients, anybody can come up to me and pay me for that product. What they cannot do is commission me to make a kind of product that is outside the norm of what I do and I have in fact turned down clients a number of times for this reason. But it wasn't because what the clients were. I simply cannot understand the mentality of living in a country that allows one to start their own business and succeed, only to turn around and put their foot down on someone else. It's utterly un-American in my mind. /soapbox
 
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This is excellent news. Hopefully this reinforcement of the concept of liberty will spread. Kudos to Mike Pence

Mike Penace should think about the legacy he is leaving for his grandchildren and their grandchildren. Not many people can say their grandpa was a state governor, and if I could, I would want to be proud of his actions. In 20 more years, his actions are going look as ass backwards as supporting racial segregation.
 
Mike Penace should think about the legacy he is leaving for his grandchildren and their grandchildren. Not many people can say their grandpa was a state governor, and if I could, I would want to be proud of his actions. In 20 more years, his actions are going look as ass backwards as supporting racial segregation.

Are you aware the Indiana RFRA largely follows the federal RFRA of 1993? Chuck Schumer of NY put it forward. (He was in the House of Representatives then.) How's Schumer's legacy?
 
And if a governor decides to pass a bill allowing discrimination of whatever YOU are?

Then what?

I am sure he gets pissed every time he hears about a bakery going out of business after refusing to decorate cakes for gay weddings. I have seen countless of conservatives gripping about that in threads here.

Any business that hangs a "we don't serve homosexuals" sign in Indiana, deserves to be protested and run out of business, and I will gladly take part in the protest. I currently live in Indianapolis, but I am not from here.

Side note: What is the current status of gay marriage in Indiana? I know Pence has been fighting against gay marriage, and they were briefly legal. I am not sure where the issue stands now.
 
I am sure he gets pissed every time he hears about a bakery going out of business after refusing to decorate cakes for gay weddings. I have seen countless of conservatives gripping about that in threads here.

Any business that hangs a "we don't serve homosexuals" sign in Indiana, deserves to be protested and run out of business, and I will gladly take part in the protest. I currently live in Indianapolis, but I am not from here.

Side note: What is the current status of gay marriage in Indiana? I know Pence has been fighting against gay marriage, and they were briefly legal. I am not sure where the issue stands now.

Legally recognized since October.
 
1) It's beside the point. Once I reach unconscionable and morally repugnant, I am not all that concerned about factual.

Hmmm..ok. I guess there is nothing I can do about that.

2) I don't agree that there is any moral distinction between deliberately allowing a preventable death and being the cause of a death. I know libertarians like to use the example of the drowning man - do I have an obligation to risk my life to save his? OK, difficult. But if I'm in a boat and all it takes is me throwing out a life preserver and a rope to save a life, and I choose not do, I've caused that death as much as if I threw him overboard.

Well, I don't think that makes any sense. If I fail to save some guy that fell overboard I didn't kill him and more likely no one else did. The guy just fell off the boat. No one is responsible for that.
 
Conventions in Indiana? :shock: I've been to conventions all over the world, and never one there. I'm not sure how the threats to Pence are going to work...they said Arizona was dead after Brewer signed her bill into law, and tourism hasn't suffered there.

I'll bet SCOTUS will overturn this easily.

Maybe, but it's not that obvious to me how state RFRA's interact with state public accommodations law that prohibit denying service because of sexual orientation. (I doubt Indiana is the first state in which this has come up). And I'm not sure the Supreme Court would be interested in taking a case like this. The Hobby Lobby decision goes somewhat into the question of how far the Free Exercise Clause allows a private person to refuse commercial transactions under its decisions (Sunday closing laws, Kosher butchers, etc.)

But the federal RFRA, the basis for the decision in Hobby Lobby, complicates things by restoring the wider view of free exercise the Court took before it drastically narrowed it in Employment Div. v. Smith in 1990. States began passing their own RFRA's after 1997, when the Court struck down a part of the federal RFRA that applied it to states in City of Boerne v. Flores. It's not completely clear yet how far these state RFRA's can reach.
 
The Indiana RFRA largely follows the federal RFRA of 1993, originally presented by (then) Representative Chuck Schumer of New York.

Yes, I get that, but I responded to someone who wants to permit any and all discrimination for any reason.

And at some level I have serious reservations about using the RFRA as a basis to discriminate in business. If we're talking about what we support, I'd much rather we be straightforward about it and either allow discrimination for any reason, perhaps against only some disfavored minorities (not OK for blacks and Jews, OK for gays and Muslims...), or prohibit it - obviously my preference. The fact that some individuals base their bigotry on religion doesn't change anything meaningful in my view. Does it make sense for a straight up f*g hating homophobe to be required to serve someone but another business that claims a religious basis for essentially the same sentiment get a pass? That doesn't make any sense.

And I'm quite sure Chuck Shumer didn't support or propose the RFRA so that businesses could use religion as a means to discriminate in commerce, so I'm not really sure what that has to do with anything. I can't imagine they anticipated that the inability to refuse service to homosexuals was a substantial burden for Christians engaged in a business open to the public.
 
Wrong.

People are free to start their businesses as membership clubs. Then they are free to discriminate. No one is forced to run their business as a public accomodation, but if they choose to do so, they have to actually serve the public.
For profit "membership clubs" are typically not except from Public Accommodation laws. To be exempt they have to be: Not-for-Profit, have bylaws and criteria, have a restrictive membership relative to the statement membership, and be governed by an elected board of the members.


Nobody would think that Costco, Sam's Club, and BJ's Warehouse would be exempt from Pubic Accommodation laws even though people pay a membership fee to join.


>>>>
For profit clubs can be restrictive in their membership


I didn't say otherwise.

What I said was that a for-profit business calling themselves a "private club" does not automatically exempt themselves from Pubic Accommodation laws - which is different from what you said.

* Selective membership and admission policies, such policies cannot intended to evade Public Accommodation laws

* Bylaws and adherence to bylaws

* Membership control over governance, non-membership control will disqualify an entity from being exempt from Public Accommodation laws.

* A clear non-business statement of purpose, commercial or business directed purposes don't qualify for exemption from Public Accommodation laws

* Operation as a "non-profit" entity, "for-profit" activities will typically disqualify an entity from being exempt from Public Accommodation laws

* Advertisement and use of facilities, advertising availablity of resources typically will disqualify an entity from Pubic Accommodation laws​


https://www.nationalclub.org/clientuploads/NCALegalQABooklet_FINAL_no print marks.pdf
Private club legal definition of Private club
http://www.cmaa.org/uploadedFiles/PCS/MayJune02legal.pdf
http://scholarship.law.umt.edu/cgi/...#search="public business versus private club"


>>>>
 
Well, I don't think that makes any sense. If I fail to save some guy that fell overboard I didn't kill him and more likely no one else did. The guy just fell off the boat. No one is responsible for that.

Seriously? So if your daughter falls overboard and some man is 10 feet away with a rope and life preserver and instead of throwing it to your daughter and saving her life, he grabs another beer and continues watching the beautiful sunset. You're good with that?

Of course you wouldn't be - you know it, we know it - if you're a normal human being, you're likely to rip his head off if given half a chance, so why make this pretense that it's morally neutral? Literally no one would conclude that if it was their loved one who wasn't saved.
 
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Conventions in Indiana? :shock: I've been to conventions all over the world, and never one there. I'm not sure how the threats to Pence are going to work...they said Arizona was dead after Brewer signed her bill into law, and tourism hasn't suffered there.

I'll bet SCOTUS will overturn this easily.

Did I miss something in Arizona. She at least originally vetoed that bill.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer vetoes SB 1062, controversial anti-gay bill - CNN.com

Wed February 26, 2014

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed a bill Wednesday that would have allowed businesses that asserted their religious beliefs the right to deny service to gay and lesbian customers.
 
Yes, food is essential. Banana smoothies? Not so much. :)

Liberty is always a balancing act. For me, personally, the government should only infringe on one's liberty when it GREATLY benefits the people and doesn't overburden them. For example, I am fine with not allowing explosives on commercial planes. The tradeoff is worth it.

Preventing people from getting their meds is not worth a person's right to do whatever they want. Preventing someone from getting a cake is.

I do limit this to private non-essential services. Publicly traded corporations should not be able to discriminate. They receive several financial advantages and protections under the law from the government and if they want to enjoy those advantages then they shouldn't be able to discriminate. And of course most grocery stores in the US are publicly traded corporations.

I think laws should change with the times. I think there was a time in our recent history that public accommodation laws made sense. But I believe we have advanced enough that they are no longer needed. The overwhelming majority of business owners just want to make a profit.

Your response is very interesting. On its' face, you make very reasonable sounding arguments that when examined, do not make sense.

For example, you point out that banana smoothies are not essential. How can I argue with that? I really doubt anyone in all of history has ever died from lack of a banana smoothie. The thing is, you're not suggesting that the makers of banana smoothies be the only one allowed to discriminate. The butcher, the baker, the greengrocer, the fishmonger too. Not only them but the dry cleaner, the shoe store, the gas station, the auto mechanic, hotels, and on and on. All of the things we consider essential to modern life. Sure, they're not the "basic needs of life" the way medical care is but life in modern times, as a practical matter, requires such things. Not knowing whether one could access such goods and services, particularly when one is travelling, would be incredibly disruptive and burdensome to people and the economy as a whole.

Even more disturbing to me is how you speak about the ability to discriminate, for any reason, as if it were a matter of liberty yet you're willing to restrict people's liberty on the most flimsy of basis. Public corps do receive benefits from the govt, but they also pay a price for them (ex double taxation and a greater amount of regulation). In addition, all businesses receive benefits from the govt. I can understand why you would want to limit public corps like that (after all, it would go a long way to ameliorating the disruption caused by arbitrary discrimination) but it lacks a rational basis grounded in our legal system.

finally, as far as the "We've come a long way, baby" argument, the fact that there's enough support for such discrimination to cause a state legislature to pass such a bill demonstrates that we still have a long way to go, and laws gauranteeing public access are still needed.
 
I decided to test my position on this issue by asking, how would I fare discriminating based on political association? In other words, could I discriminate against someone for being a Neo-Nazi? And I said, sure, why not, the bastards are hostile and repugnant to everything I am (though why a Neo-Nazi would want to give money to a Jew is entirely another kind of discussion).

Whoops! I'd be successfully sued for this, apparently.

KKK wins lawsuit against bakery for discrimination | Tribune Herald

Which leads to at least one question: wtf is it with business discrimination lawsuits and bakeries anyway? At one point did the universe declare that humanity's discrimination wars would be waged in our nation's bakeries?
 
If I recall correctly, it was the black voters who passed Proposition 8 in the blue state of California.


Blacks were 7% of the voting population and voted 58% in support of Prop 8.


Other demographics that had a greater impact were:

Conservative - 36% of the voting population voting 82% in support of the measure
Republican - 34% of the voting population voting 81% in support of the measure
Weekly Religious Services - 45% of the voting population voting 70% of the measure
Age 65+ - 23% of the voting population voting 67% in support of the measure
Latino/Hispanic - 14% of the voting population voting 59% in support of the measure​



It would be more accurate to say that Conservatives, Republicans, Religous Folks, older folks, and Latino/Hispanics had more impact on passing Prop 8 than did Blacks.


http://www.thetaskforce.org/static_html/downloads/reports/reports/pi_prop8_1_6_09.pdf

>>>>
 
Blacks were 7% of the voting population and voted 58% in support of Prop 8.


Other demographics that had a greater impact were:

Conservative - 36% of the voting population voting 82% in support of the measure
Republican - 34% of the voting population voting 81% in support of the measure
Weekly Religious Services - 45% of the voting population voting 70% of the measure
Age 65+ - 23% of the voting population voting 67% in support of the measure
Latino/Hispanic - 14% of the voting population voting 59% in support of the measure​



It would be more accurate to say that Conservatives, Republicans, Religous Folks, older folks, and Latino/Hispanics had more impact on passing Prop 8 than did Blacks.


http://www.thetaskforce.org/static_html/downloads/reports/reports/pi_prop8_1_6_09.pdf

>>>>

Except that several of your categories overlap to a great extent. Blacks were the unexpected difference makers.
 
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