Re: same sex regulations - discrimination against Christians?

On 18 May 2007 20:55:53 +0100, Gareth McCaughan put finger to keyboard
and typed:

Mark Goodge wrote:

[Marc Rasell:]
1) Christian printers who may be asked to print material promoting
homosexuality

[me:]
Yeah, 'cos if you want to print material promoting homosexuality
the obvious first port of call is Falwell & Haggard Printers, Inc.

[Mark:]
Well, it might be if part of your aim was deliberately to embarrass
Falwell & Haggard Printers, Inc.

Well, sure. It doesn't seem to me that the law is required to
defend every organization from the danger that someone else
might seek to embarrass them, especially not in a way that
brings them profits at the expense of the would-be embarrasser.

No, indeed not. But, equally, I don't see any reason why the law
should aid the would-be embrasser either.

It's not as if anyone (other than when engaged in silly political
campaigning) actually thinks that a printer has to endorse the
material they print.

Some material is, effectively, political campaigning. And I don't see
why a printer shuld be required to print material that opposes what
the printer believes in.

(A publisher, yes, but no one is suggesting
that IVP should be required to publish books endorsing homosexual
practice.)

The new law could make it difficult for them to decline, though.

Or it could well be if you knew
nothing about them, and had merely picked them from the Yellow Pages.

OK, so now the situation we have is that a printer chooses to
advertise its services in a generic way that gives no indication
of any special restrictions on what they'll do; and yet they
(unlike approximately all other printers in the world) are so
wedded to the sanctity of every word they print that they will
be hurt by being paid to print a poster advertising a Gay Pride
march or whatever.

Maybe I'm somehow lacking empathy, but this just doesn't seem
to me like a major problem. If they can't bear to print things
that aren't Sound -- and it's not just things "promoting
homosexuality" that are an issue, after all -- then all they
need to do is to trade under a name like "Washed in the Blood
Printing, Ltd" and tweak their advertisements to make it
clear what sort of business they are.

For the sake of clarity, I should add that actually I would
much prefer the law to allow fundamentalist printers to refuse
to print material promoting Ickiness, and left-wing hotel
owners to refuse to offer rooms to capitalists, and so on.
But I just don't see that there's substantial harm being
done to anyone here.

I think the harm is more general; it's the harm that is caused
whenever someone's freedom of action is limited, however trivial the
cause for which they are fighting. At the risk of employing a
slippery-slope argument, I think that this is the sort of thing that
needs to be declared to be wrong even when it doesn't really matter
much, because if the principle of restricting freedom of choice gains
popular currency then when it does matter it will be a lot harder to
stop. I'm reminded a bit here of Bonhoeffer's famous "first they came
for..." quote; the fact that (in reality) I think that a printer who
refused to print a pro-gay pamphlet would be acting rather
intemperately doesn't affect the fact that I think it would be far
worse to legislate to force him to print it.

4) hotel / b & b owners

What about them? What awful thing will happen to a hotel
or B&B owner if a same-sex couple uses one of her rooms?

Like you, I think that the adoption agency issue is different to the
question of business operators. But there is still a serious issue
here. Many businesses are profitable specifically because they address
a particular niche market, and part of their appeal to that market is
that they don't have customers from outside it. If a business was
forced to accept customers that don't fit its niche, then customers
from that sector may well go elsewhere.

How does that work if "elsewhere" is equally required to
take black^Wpoor^WJewish^Wnon-Aryan^Wgay customers? Where
else are those customers so sensitive that they can't bear
to be in a hotel where gay people might also be staying
going to go instead?

They may just go nowhere, of course. Or they may end up in a
bog-standard chain instead of somewhere with a bit of individuality,
because the chains are cheaper and there's no reason to go elsewhere
as nowhere else can offer anything particularly appealing.


For example, a lot of
Christian-run small hotels and B&Bs market themselves on providing a
Christian and "family-friendly" environment. If it became known that
such an establishment was accepting homosexual couples as guests, then
a large proportion of its key trade would dry up, and risk the
establishment becoming unprofitable. The same applies in reverse to
gay-run hotels (ukrc passim), where the hoteliers have the same fears
about having to admit straight couples. More recently, it has been
pointed out that proposed laws on age discrimination will, if
implemented unchanged, effectively put the Saga group out of
business[1]. Presumably, much the same would happen to Club 18-30.

I'd guess that they would find it easier to work around the law
than Christian hoteliers wanting to exclude gay couples would.

Maybe; later reports suggest that the government are planning to
include a specific exemption for them. But that itself indicates how
unfair the proposed laws are; they're easy to work around if you're a
large corporation with expensive legal advice and plenty of clout, but
the small firm and sole proprietor gets clobbered.

Mark
--
Visit: http://names.orangehedgehog.com - British surname distribution profiles
"Everybody's changing and I don't feel the same"
.

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