zompist wrote: Is Sal OK with...
While I knew you'd write this, I'll have to stop you there. What does any of this have to do with me? The fact that I acknowledge that some right-wing people are not
absolutely insane has nothing to do with whether or not I think that they're
right.
This is what irritates me most about conservatives like you, whether right-wing or left-wing: the need to always not just be right, but be unambiguously right, to assume that if doing X may be the right thing, that means that there can never be good reasons against X. Whereas the liberal position is to acknowledge that there can be valid concerns on both sides, different rights to balance, and then work out how best to balance them in the particular situation. Oppression doesn't become good when it's done in a good cause - it becomes a necessary evil, which can only be justified to the extent that it
is necessary. And that requires an intellectually honest assessment of arguments on both sides, not kneejerk reactionnary dogpiling on anyone who even suggests that basic principles of morality and political justice might apply on the other side too
even when not dissenting in actual recommendations.
A few general points:
- the argument that other religious people don't have a problem with gays, so nobody's religious freedom is being impeached... so? And some atheists aren't gay. What "every person belonging to group X thinks" is irrelevent - what matters is the specific people under discussion. "Christians" do not all believe the same things - Christians don't have fewer (or more) rights if they happen to disagree with other (even most) Christians. One reason America exists is precisely because the religious freedoms of some christians were being denied them by
other christians
- these things don't happen, nobody ever gets prosecuted or shut down for not selling gay cakes.... well, that's just not true. There have been a number of prosecutions of bakers, and others of florists and similar service providers, in many countries, with crushing punishments applied - more than $100,000 in one case, for refusing to make one cake (ok the effect wasn't crushing because they raised the money through donations, but that's irrelevent to the justice of the sentence). In a UK case, the issue wasn't even a generic gay wedding cake, but specifically a cake with the slogan "we support gay marriage" written on it, and nobody asked whether the people trying to buy the cake were actually gay. [people have tried suing bakers for refusing to write "we do not support gay marriage", but have failed - so the state is deciding which forms of speech (or silence) are permissable and which are not; as an ironic twist, the state itself, at the time,
did not permit gay marriage]. To me, even if you believe that there is a pressing policy need that justifies that sort of state coercion (and yes, destroying a family's livelihood is coercion), it must at least be admitted that that need involves overriding valid concerns regarding freedom of speech, association and labour. And where one valid need overrides another, there will always be some who, quite rationally and non-evilly, do not agree with the majority as regards the precise weighting of those needs, often due to a difference in personal experience
- but christians are the majority... so? Whether someone is in the majority or the minority is irrelevent to a consideration of their basic human rights. In any case,
the sort of Christian who has a problem with this is clearly not in a majority, or else the laws wouldn't have been passed. It's comforting to think of the government stepping in to beat down the evil majority, but in a democracy that essentially never happens, because the government is the voice (and long arm) of the majority. The most that can be hoped for is that a local majority may be attacked by a
national (or international) majority
on behalf of some oppressed local minority. But that is still a majority stomping on a dissenting minority, and should bring with it all the concerns that that entails; it also inevitably raises questions of democratic legitimacy. Now again, that doesn't mean that imperialist central government, or international, policies are wrong. For instance, some forms of female genital mutilation constitute a fundamental evil, and western countries can at least theoretically be justified in compelling local people to abandon these practices. But it is naive and reactionnary to assume a blanket right to do so
and to deny that this even raises valid moral questions.
It's also worth pointing out that the US is not the whole of the world. We are having the same issues in the UK, where Christians by any serious measurement
are (quite a small) minority.
- "taking the majority's side".... morality is not a matter of picking the people you like the most and then always taking their side. But if you really need to calculate these things by Whose Side You're On... even Peter Fucking Tatchell is on the side of "religious liberty" in the great cake debate. ["In my view, it is an infringement of freedom to require businesses to aid the promotion of ideas to which they conscientiously object. Discrimination against people should be unlawful, but not against ideas."]
- do shopkeepers have a right to ask questions?.... well, that's an interesting question, but it's also irrelevent. Because it's perfectly coherent to say that someone has a right to not associate themselves with a political message that they know they disagree with,
without saying that they have a right to interrogate customers to gain further information before making their decision. Again, I'm not saying whether that's right or wrong, but the question of what shopkeepers can ask you is entirely separate from the question of what they can refuse point blank.
- but sometimes everyone is bigoted.... yes, and clearly the question of the availability of services from another artisan is at least potentially relevent to the question of how socially sub-optimal withholding of services by individual artisans should be dealt with.
But I guess it's pointless saying this, since one side of the debate has no interest in engaging in what anybody actually says, rather than ludicrous, simplistic caricatures.