Re: Religious Objection to Minimum Wage
Incorrect. The crime would be trespass. If a black person doesn't want a white person on their lawn simply because they are white, would calling the police to remove the white person be government enforced racial discrimination?
Wrong. There's a BIG difference between one's private property that is NOT open to the public, and one's business that IS open to the public. The moment you call the police because you have a policy that your business does not serve those of a particular race...at that moment you are calling for government-enforced racism. Maybe you look back fondly to the days of Jim Crow...but most Americans don't.
Tell you what, guy - here's a story I often tell to libertarians who think that Americans should have a 'right' to be racist.
I grew up in the MS Delta, and there was only one doctor's office in Shaw where I graduated high school. This doctor's office had two entrances, and the signs above the doors said "white" and "colored". Sure, the signs were completely painted over with a dark green paint...but paint doesn't hide inch-deep chisels in marble too well. And the locals obeyed these signs. The blacks did so because they knew that the whites held the economic power, and the blacks knew that if they got 'uppity', then they and/or their families would soon find themselves out of a job, or their lease not renewed on their house, or things happening to their cars.
That was in 1984 - twenty years after the Civil Rights Act...and I didn't do anything about it because in those days I was still strongly conservative and moderately racist.
Things have changed there a little bit (while I've changed a great deal) - those signs are gone, but in the last presidential election, I noticed that there was not a single 'Obama' sticker on any cars in the county...despite the fact that this was in Sunflower County, which is
seventy-one percent black. Think about that - the "blackest" county in America, and not one Obama sticker to be found. Why do you suppose that was?
I asked a black friend of mine (who knew I was an Obama supporter), "Eddie, I'm looking around at all the cars, and I don't see a single Obama sticker. Why?"
Eddie looked back at me with his sad eyes - he's been going through some truly hard times - and said, "Pete, you know why."
And he was right. There were no Obama stickers for the same reason the blacks obeyed those "white" and "colored" signs above the entrances to the only doctor's office in town.
IN OTHER WORDS, guy, I know a bit more than most whites about what happens when racism is tolerated and enforced - by society, if not by law. What you're advocating would go back to those days. Is that really, truly something you want?