Comment by Spivak
9 years ago
A few business decide not to provide goods and services to black people -- not great but there are other options.
Every business decides to stop doing business with black people we have a real problem.
9 years ago
A few business decide not to provide goods and services to black people -- not great but there are other options.
Every business decides to stop doing business with black people we have a real problem.
The way I look at it is, assuming you don't hold a monopoly on a particular service, you can choose not to do business with certain people, for whatever (legal) reason.
However, it cuts both ways: your other customers also have the option to boycott you and encourage other people to do the same.
And if every business decides to stop doing business with certain people, then either a) those people really need to rethink what they want to do, because maybe everyone else thinks they're reprehensible, or b) we actually do have a case of a civil rights violation in a new way that we haven't considered making a law for.
Every business deciding not to serve black people would be a case of (b) (though retrograde, as we already have laws around that), and refusing to provide service to hate groups is, IMO, clearly (a).
If you think Nazism, a racist, hateful ideology opposed to the existence of many groups of people, is equivalent to being black in America, we have nothing to discuss.
To add to this, race is a protected class [1]. We carefully and conservatively enumerate the classes a business holding itself out to the public may not discriminate based on. Political ideology is not a protected class almost anywhere in America.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class
Of course, but you're ignoring that protected class status is usually granted when discrimination be so pervasive that it is a burden its recipients.
If it becomes commonplace to discriminate against people based on their political ideology then we may very well see the 'political party' protection broadened.
2 replies →
I don't. I'm trying to explain that there are limits to 'private businesses can choose not to do businesses with anyone' with a historical example.
In small doses businesses can refuse service to classes of people, but when the discrimination is so commonplace that it becomes a burden to those being discriminated against then you may see the creation of a new protected class (or realistically the broadening of an existing one) to make sure they aren't starved or unable to find employment.