The Glade 4.0

Evidently neither does the law. It's the same law that something like 30 other states and the Federal government have and it's just convenient to make a stink in Indiana because of the people passing the law, not because of its content. All the law really says is that the government needs to show compelling state interest before burdening free exercise of religion. This makes sense, the government should have to show compelling interest before burdening anything.

In reality, trying to figure out who is and isn't gay coming into an establishment like a restaurant and gas station isn't practical, and as for wedding cakes - if someone wants to be a shitlord and not make your wedding cake, take your business to someone who is not a shitlord. Using the force of law to compel them to make your cake is certainly NOT likely to make them less of a shitlord, or for that matter anyone else. In fact, it's a good way to make people even MORE intolerant because it contributes to the perception of people wanting the law to give them special treatment. There are a lot of people out there that are pretty deeply offended that someone won't make a wedding cake for a gay couple but are even MORE offended when the government comes in and starts fining people and putting them out of business for it. It looks pretty ridiculous when the Westboro Baptist Church and the KKK have a right to protest and antagonize people but BY DAMN YOU ARE NOT GOING TO DENY SOMEONE A WEDDING CAKE RARRR!!

Of course, we don't want to do anything that might actually reduce discrimination because discrimination is valuable political currency. We need victims to have someone to champion.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

You people have heard of debit cards, right? You know you can just stick them in the pump, and not even go inside?



That's because it's too cold to walk all the way inside.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Raf, I think you and DE are deluding yourselves if you think it's hard to effectively discriminate against gay people without incurring a lot of false positives. That's only true if gay people, particularly gay couples, make a tremendous effort to hide their orientation - no affectionate behavior towards your partner, no flirting with other gay people, no behavior that doesn't conformed to traditional gender performance (e.g., no butch women or effeminate guys), etc. The "closet" exists for a reason, and the supposed safeguard against discrimination that you're suggesting relies on gay people staying in it, which I hope you realize is a completely unfair and psychologically damaging requirement to impose.

I think you're deluding yourself if you think everyday businesses are really going to have their employees waste time looking for this stuff. If they're busy, they need their employees doing actual work. If they are not busy then they need the business.

There are plenty of effeminate but straight men - that's where "meterosexual" comes in and plenty of butch or tomboyish straight women. That's a total non-starter right there. Gay people are not generally in the closet because of the social disapproval of people they barely know. They tend to stay there because of family and other close connections. That's what's damaging about the "closet" - it's having to stay in it because you fear (rightly or wrongly) the reactions of people who are close to you and are supposed to care about you. If it were something that had anything to do with the law gay people would very rarely be in the closet now because we already have those laws.

I realize you guys like to think there is some massive tide of bigotry only held back by the law, but that's really not the case. It wasn't even the case in 1965; you had large portions of the country that DIDN'T have Jim Crow laws and other forms of discrimination. If things were really the way you imagine we would never have had these laws in the first place because the people that pass things like that would never get elected.

Where I live you can find social discrimination just fine. You can go in the average gas station and try to order a taco in English and get a confused look, so you order in Spanish because the lady "doesn't speak English" - but she also looks confused when you order it "con tocino" so you have to say "bacon" - because she "doesn't speak English" but doesn't know the Spanish word for a common food that she serves every day in a place where the majority of people speak at least some Spanish.

If tomorrow antidiscrimination laws went away, I would still be able to buy my taco just like today. They are not going to start kicking white people out of the gas station with no taco - they're just going to keep pretending they only speak Spanish that they don't speak all that well in the first place and talking in it because they assume you don't understand it while they call you a "pendejo".

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

From experience, this is true.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Man. In your situation I'd be highly tempted to show them your border guard ID and ask to see their citizenship papers.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Sadly, workplace enforcement is the job of a different agency.... because you know it's a lot more efficient to have 4 or 5 agencies do immigration enforcement instead of just 1 or 2.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I think the point is just to scare the **** out of them...

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

This is only true because these days actual discrimination against homosexuals for being homosexual is the exception, not the rule. If we still had 1950s attitudes towards homosexuality, you can bet the vast majority of homosexuals would still be in the closet even if they were lucky enough to have family and friends that accepted it.

Your first sentence is also exactly why I think anti-black discrimination would continue to exist. Like you said, they don't have time to actually look into the content of this random person's character, so they'll make a snap judgment based on what's obvious. He's black, so he's a higher risk. It doesn't mean they actually hate black people in the sense that they think they are genetically inferior or subhuman, that kind of racism is almost completely dead other than a few fringe groups that are a joke to everyone else. They're just looking to protect themselves against a perceived higher risk group.

Also, I get very annoyed by the massive hypocrisy inherent in the religious right claiming that homosexuals should not be a protected class because being gay is a choice, while simultaneously benefiting from the fact that religion is the ONLY protected class under federal law that is based on someone's choices.

That said, I would actually be fine with it if they were to abolish the anti-discrimination laws. I just absolutely hate the copout justification of, "Well, there's really no more racism going on anyways, so nothing bad will happen to black people as a result." Yes, some black people will get screwed by racist whites, but that's something you have to accept if you want to preserve freedom of association.

First, you're making a circular argument. You're trying to establish that attitudes towards gays would result in massive discrimination without laws against it - when people point out that this is impractical and that social attitudes have changed and they stay in the closet because of the attitudes of people close to them you can't go back and say "but it's only because of the laws!" That's what you're trying to show. We are not in the 1950s, and repealing the laws would not somehow revert us to that. Acceptance of homosexuality even if it's limited to "it's none of my business" is much more widespread, and even if it weren't other laws would remain in place. In the 1950s you could probably get away with assaulting gay people even though it was technically illegal - today, very few courts would let that slide if any.

It's especially laughable that you say this in the face of a bona fide bisexual person telling you that it's because of family and other close relationships just a few posts up.



So somehow being black is what's obvious but dressing and acting like a thug isn't? That's totally absurd. If a black man in a suit walks in, they ignore the suit? How about a work uniform? A military uniform?

If you're talking about credit applications then skin color and other aspects of personal appearance aren't going to be the first thing they see.



Unfortunately for you, that's because the First Amendment says so - and that same provision is also what protects your choice to not believe. Race is under a similar (although not semantically identical) category based on the Fifteenth Amendment. If you want another amendment for gay people, see if you can get one proposed. There's a system for that, you know.

Second, what the religious right is (usually) saying is that homosexual behaviors are a choice. Technically, this is true. One can choose not to engage in sexual behavior. Yes, this is an unreasonable request, but it does not change the fact that it is a behavior, and that is where the Wedding Cake problem comes in - the law requires people to participate in behavior they object to, and not for any reason of real import. We may compel people to fight against invaders. We might compel people to get medical treatment for their children. Compelling people to make wedding cakes so as not to hurt feelings somehow does not rise to that level.

Incidentally, that is also what makes this law and others like it a bit silly. By the same token, protecting the sensibilities of cake makers is not a crisis of national security. The legislature, in passing these laws is simply saying "nyah nyah" at antidiscrimination laws that they themselves (or their predecessors) should not have passed in the first place.

Finally, no one really gives a **** what annoys you. The left is really good at saying how appalled, annoyed, disgusted, whatever they are at things they disagree with as if the mere annoyance of the left should somehow be an argument against <whatever>. Do you think that your views are so morally pure and right that opposing views will just shrivel up and go away in the face of your righteous annoyance?



No one is claiming that there is absolutely no racism or that racists are not going on. the claim is that racism is isolated and impotent - Black people may occasionally have to put up with a bona fide racist who can get away with something really obnoxious, annoying, or inconvenient - but the fact is that whites already have to put up with the same thing from minorities. Or worse, you know like getting falsely accused of murdering some thug that was attacking them. That's happened twice now and both times it's only been because it was a black guy that died and both times it turned out to be total horseshit.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Obviously we're not even doing a good job of that.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I've said nothing about gays up to this point, all my arguments have been about black people. Also, I've been pretty consistent in saying that the vast majority of potential discrimination would come from judgments about risk when people see black skin color, something that doesn't apply to homosexuals both because their sexual orientation isn't immediately apparent, and also because they don't commit crimes at a higher rate than the average as well as being poorer than average like black people are. In fact, in areas where homosexuals are a significantly higher risk overall, they DO face discrimination today based on that risk. For example, homosexuals aren't allowed to donate blood or transplant organs. I don't really see any reason why this would not occur against blacks if it were legal to do so.



The First Amendment has absolutely nothing to do with this, it prevents the government from discriminating based on religion, not private individuals or organizations. Religious discrimination was perfectly legal in the US until the Civil Rights Act banned it in 1964.



The problem here is it's amazingly hypocritical to support laws that make it legal to discriminate against homosexuals, using the argument, "the law shouldn't require people to participate in behavior they object to," while simultaneously supporting other laws that do exactly this. I cannot refuse to sell a wedding cake to a Jewish or Muslim couple, regardless of how much I may disagree with their behavior. Now, I'm not saying you are doing this, as you've been pretty consistent in your position that you don't like anti-discrimination laws at all, but you can bet your *** that 9 out of 10 religious conservatives that supports this Indiana statute would never in a million years support a similar statute that allowed people to not sell wedding cakes to Jews.

Are we or are we not using blacks as an analogue to gays? If not, then I have o idea why we've been discussing them for a page and a half.



I already explained why - because along with "black" there are other, equally visible and much more reliable indicators to go on.

As for not being able to donate blood and organs, that's because of a specific risk, and is increasingly being called into question.



Yes, I understand that. The thing is, however, that the Civil Rights Act reflects the categories that the Constitution protects. m If gays had their own amendment at the time, they would have been included also. It's not an accident that they picked the categories they picked; the Civil Rights Act extended "protection from government" to "protection from everyone." Furthermore, that protection extends to you and your nonbelief as well, so you have no real reason for annoyance.



They supported this statute which does precisely that, assuming the statute actually means what you think it means. If someone says it's against their religion as a <x> to sell cake to someone who believes in <y> they can allegedly do that in Indiana. <y> does not have to be anything to do with gays at all; people are just assuming it does because of the recent insistence of gays on ordering cakes from people that don't want to sell them cake.

If we didn't have antidiscrimination laws the gay folks could take their business to someone that actually wants it and if they really felt like it protest the cake shop.

Instead we are treated to this total societal shitshow of idiots who can't understand the bible wasn't written originally in English not wanting to sell cake to gays, gays countering by going to court over wedding cake and pretending to stand up for their rights when essentially all they are doing is using the law to troll a bunch of easily trolled idiots. On top of this the legislature is dancing around trying to pass a convoluted law that says "you can sort of discriminate but not really" to protect a few cake shops - and honestly I still cannot think of another business outside the wedding industry that can economically discriminate against gays. Now we get a bunch of lunatics marching around in Indianapolis waving signs all of which might as well read "I demand the right to give my money to idiots who hate 'faggots'."

And this strikes you as a good idea.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I never said it would be "easy" or "difficult" in some absolute sense, only that it would it would be less simple than discriminating against someone for being black, and for patently obvious reasons.

At any rate, neither type of discrimination is particularly beneficial for business, both from the direct loss of sales and the indirect loss of sales from having a stained reputation. Both of these typically would outweigh the benefit from the peception gained by being anti-gay, -black, -tattooed, -female etc.

And if not? So what. Laws don't change culture. Laws follow culture, not the other way around. The way to change the nature of discrimination is to change people's minds, not the laws they're subject to.


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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

I don't believe that, 100%. But I do believe that it's correct 90%+ of the time.

I've known some people (mostly women) who were straight before, but due to some extreme sexual abuse/assault they were traumatized into never wanting to be attracted to the opposite sex ever again.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

Honestly, i'm almost as irritated at comments that treat sexual orientation as some binary thing that you're born with and never changes, as I am at people who think you can simply "choose" not to be gay. There are so many faulty assumptions made on both sides of that argument that it's impossible to agree with either.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

You also get the gay people that think bi is "cheating" or "faking" or who think they can "corrupt" people into being gay.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."