- Joined
- Jan 12, 2005
- Messages
- 23,580
- Reaction score
- 12,388
- Location
- New Mexico
- Gender
- Female
- Political Leaning
- Independent
I am not a libertarian, and that is not what I am saying. I know very well that the First Amendment does not directly guarantee the freedom of association, and that the Court inferred it in 1957 in NAACP v. Alabama. I also know that, as the Chief Justice pointed out in his dissent in Obergefell, the Constitution does not embody the harm principle of J.S. Mill.
You are lumping together groups of people that the Constitution--and in particular the Fourteenth Amendment--does not protect to the same degree. The Equal Protection Clause of that amendment was meant to prohibit states, especially ones that had been Confederate, from discriminating against the millions of newly freed blacks. It was reasonable of the Supreme Court to interpret the guarantee of equal protection to include other races and to include a person's national origin. For the Court to extend that guarantee much beyond those things, though, is to overreach its authority. The Fourteenth Amendment did not repeal the Tenth, and federalism is basic to the structure of our Constitution. That Constitution designs a federal government in which power is divided between the United States and the several states--not a national government which bends everyone to its will. That kind of thing belongs in the totalitarian regimes we saw arise in Europe early in the last century.
If what was the law, and where? I don't consider it my business to judge how some other state has damaged its society by making laws about matters which raise no constitutional issue, and which the majority of that state's residents therefore has a perfect right to make.
Anyone who does not live in a particular state is free to consider that state's laws as coarse and base and aesthetically damaging as he likes. He can stand in the city park and rail at those laws all day long, or put a map of the offensive state on his wall and pepper it with darts. But unless that state's laws raise some constitutional issue that affects him in a concrete way, he has no legal standing to challenge them.
The usual way to require private persons who own and operate public accommodations to serve would-be customers is not through requiring certain clauses in business licenses, but by making public accommodations laws which impose that requirement. And if a state chooses to forbid private persons who own or operate public accommodations from discriminating on the basis on sexual preference, it has an inherent right as a sovereign to do that. In the same way, though, a state which chooses to allow those private persons to discriminate on that basis is also free to do that. But the authority to make either decision belongs to the majority of that state's residents--not to non-resident busybodies.
We now seem to be arguing different principles or concepts and/or are talking past each other's points, but do not seem to have serious disagreement anywhere, so thanks for a reasoned and civil discussion. I did enjoy it. But think we have probably now said what we have to offer for the topic.