What is the advantage of doing this over bitcoin? Sure the price of bitcoin is highly volatile. The price of gold is highly volatile as well. If you tie the dollar to gold, the dollar becomes volatile as well.
The nice thing about bitcoin is that you skip the government middle man. You don't need to trust the government not to print more money than what it represents in gold reserves. You don't need to trust banks not to steal your money. You only have to trust that you can keep a secret password a secret. But then again you had to do that with online banking as well anyway.
Bitcoins are able to be used outside of an exchange. Casino chips can only be redeemed at the casino. In my example the casino chips represent GoxCoin (a promise of a bitcoin from mt gox), and the dollar represents a real bitcoin. The casino doesn't care if you keep the chip, as they are now worthless. Mt. Gox is not allowing people to withdraw money or real bitcoins. They are/were only allowing people to exchange promises of bitcoins (GoxCoins). This is similar to how a casino chip is a promise (which can be broken) of X dollars. Bitcoins at one point were trading at 5x the value of GoxCoins, which indicated that the market was only about 20% sure that Mt. Gox would ever allow withdrawals again.
Wouldn't transferring some bitcoins from your phone be more convenient than bringing a selection of gold and silver coins whenever you plan to buy something?
You can't get your money back from a person who steals your money and buries it at an undisclosed location either. Maybe you can get your money back in some other way (like through liquidation of assets, or wage garnishment), but then you could do that with bitcoin as well.
I much prefer a system where others can't take my money without my approval, over one where I am somewhat protected if a give my money to a crook by mistake.
It's not that I wouldn't like to be able to get my money back. It's that when you have this mechanism, you open the door to abuse. Governments can freeze the money in your bank account. They can take your car or house away if it was used to sell drugs (which are illegal but not immoral).
Every way to store/transact money carries risks. I accept the risk that people may break promises if I give them money. I prefer this risk to allowing the government authority to take my money through cooperation of my bank if they feel justified. If the government were a better arbiter of fairness, I might be convinced, but there are just as many crooks in the government as out on the streets.
How are you supposed to buy things from online stores with gold? File off some shavings into an envelope and mail order stuff from online? Are we really going to all carry gold and silver coins in our pockets when we go shopping?
Gold isn't really useful as a currency if it is just sitting in a vault.
What if you went to an Indian casino, exchanged your dollars for chips, and when you went to leave and cash out your remaining chips, they refused to exchange the chips for dollars, and instead decided to close shop. Would you still trust the dollar?
That's essentially analogous to what this article is asking. Maybe bitcoin has porblems. It's too volatile to be an effective unit of cost. Those are separate issues from the problems Mt. Gox is having.
Even the dollar has problems with corruption and cronyism involving the treasury, the fed, wallstreet, and too big to fail banks, that doesn't mean that an indian casino deciding to steal your money is due to any weakness in the dollar. That's just a business failing to uphold a promise either through theft or incompetence.
Mt Gox is a financial institution that didn't have it's shit together. Yes it dealt in bitcoins. It also dealt equally in dollars and other currencies (i.e. because it was an exchange). That doesn't mean it the dollar or bitcoin is weak. They still could be, but it's not because of Mt. Gox.
We don't *need* homosexuality to keep people from doing evil things, for the same reason we don't need beanie babies to prevent people from doing horrible things. Nobody ever claimed that homosexuality or beanie babies were stopping sociopaths from doing terrible things.
Unlike homosexuality and beanie babies. Some people actually do
claim that we need religion/Christianity to prevent sociopaths from acting out. This is when pointing out that we don;t need Christianity for this purpose becomes relevant.
So you want to ban one group while empowering another? hypocrite much??
I am not talking about the legal definition of discrimination. Obviously there are all sorts of discrimination that aren't referred to as such in law. Schools discriminate against kids who didn't study when they give them bad grades. The NBA discriminates against short people. But we can't use the law itself as a guide to what the law *should* be.
If the government can regulate what is thought and said in a private home regarding racism, what's to prevent the government from regulating what can be thought and said in a private home regarding religion, taxes, science, or any other topic?
Slippery slope arguments are always a bit tough to pull off. Even if the government never overstepped it's bound of only restricting racist discrimination in private, I think there is something gained by not giving the government his power.
What is gained by allowing people to be racist is a society where people are allowed autonomy. That is they are allowed to think their own thoughts and make their own decisions so long as it does not unjustly harm anyone else. It probably is not practical to offer 100% autonomy to people, but I would say that any restriction of autonomy should come with a very strong justification.
For example: "People may be offended by racial slurs" is not a string enough justification for restricting autonomy (i.e. freedom of speech).
I argue that: "People might not hire you because of your race" or "People might not serve you at a business because of your sexual orientation" is not enough justification for restricting autonomy either.
For me I am willing to restrict autonomy when someone's life is in danger, but probably not much else.
I am not advocating for it. I am saying that we shouldn't just take it for granted. I am saying that the rationale for the 1st amendment is important and it's scope is not limited to just speech. It is not sufficient to simply advocate free speech. We must know the reason why it is good in order to see if the same reasons apply anywhere else.
Any law that limits any of that is unconstitutional, and would immediately be thrown out by any judge worth wearing the robe.
As I have said before, I am not arguing that it is not illegal to violate the 1st amendment. The rationale for preserving a particular law should not simply be "because it's the law". We can change laws. It's not as if they are given to us by God. We must be capable of deciding what laws are good and why, and simply assuming the laws that already exist must be good or they wouldn't be there is not good enough.
What about "In God we Trust" on government and other public spaces and similar deity based proclamations?
It's not a violation of religious freedom per se. But it is a violation of the idea of separation of church and state. The 1st amendment is a bit ambiguous, but the supreme court has ruled that it is effectively enforcing separation of church and state. Maybe it's not a serious enough violation (or one that is easily fixed), and so the issue hasn't been pushed.
What about statements about God in the Pledge of Allegiance and other government "approved" songs and chants?
The pledge of allegiance should be removed from schools even if it didn't mention God. We should be teaching our kids to be critical thinkers, not forcing them to swear allegiance to a nation before they are even old enough to understand what it means. Needless to say, the government should not be in the song approval business.
1. If it is a big enough company (e.g. 20 people?), it will be made public because it's pretty hard to organize lots of people into enforcing institutionalized racism without this information getting out. For really small businesses, I think it will just have to be up to the businesses to be honest about their racism or up to yelpers to call them out. Honestly I don;t see a reason for store owners not to advertise their bigotry. If they are trying to make publicity, this helps. If they don't gays in their store, what better way than to tell them they are not welcome before they even come in?
2. I think this might have been a problem in the 50's or something. If anyone did that now there would even be republicans calling for boycotts of these businesses. This is exactly the sort of thing I would want to happen. I want to see bigots being bigots in public and being completely crushed in public discourse, and ruined financially. But I don;t think this is likely to happen with any big chains.
3. Absolutely. I think it may take some time to remove it from all money in circulation. I would personally be OK with just removing it from any newly printed money to save.......money.
So, being pragmatic, do you really think the current Congress, the leaders of most Southern USA states, and most of the "religious right" will support this?
Not today or tomorrow. But there is a very fast shift away from religiosity in this country. The only major religion that is actually growing in terms of relation to the population, is islam, and that's happening in africa, middle east, and asia. IN the US by far the fastest growing group is non religious. The percentage has doubled since 2006 (I believe is it like 8%->15%). I think there are a lot of people who are religious simply because they want to conform with the majority. Once non-religious people get to around 40% or so, there will be no clear majority and that will be the tipping point. All the people who believe in Christianity because it was the easiest thing to do in their community, will switch to believing in science as a religion instead (i.e. science is true because the scientists said so). This is probably not ideal, but it's better than the alternative. We had only 1 confirmed atheist in congress (pete stark who left office in 2013). This is going to change big time in the next decade or 2. The reason it hasn't happened already is because there are no districts with 50% atheists, like there are districts with 50% black, latino, asian, etc. Atheists don't clump together. So we don;t see any benefit from having 15% market share. But once this goes higher, it will be a different story.
I think we will start seeing big changes in 1 generation, and nearly a complete transformation by 2. It only took Europe about that long to go from the deferender of christianity to the most secular continent.
Replace the word shirt with black. If you think a "no shirt policy" is applied equally. Then a "no blacks" policy is applied equally as well. Granted one of these is definitely immoral and the other is likely not, but the mechanics of applying discrimination rules work the same way regardless of whether they are done in a sensible scenario or in a morally despicable scenario. They are both discrimination. Discrimination isn't always bad.
As to firing someone for practicing religion while working, absolutely they should be fired, if the employer doesn't allow such. It's still a private company, which company policy and employees excepted to perform and act within company guidelines.
I would go one step further and allow people to be fired for any reason, including just being a member of a religion, or being a bigot, or being anything. If the reason is good, then the community will support it. If it is not a good reason then the community might do a boycott or leave negative yelp reviews, etc. The point is that I think this kind of public shaming is a better mechanism for enforcing this kind of good behavior than laws. The law is pretty good at figuring out if you are guilty of murder. It is not good at figuring out if you are a bigot (because this is rather subjective).
I can't claim one way or another what is or isn't true in the bible,
Enough of it is ridiculously false that I think it's pretty safe to discount the entire thing as untrustworthy. I'm sure there is some stuff in the bible that must be trivially true, but even a broken clock is right twice a day.
You can find good stories in Lord of the rings that teach people to be moral as well. In fact in lord of the rings they don't condone slavery, rape, and genocide, so it's probably a better moral guide than the Bible.
That said, discrimination laws are not against thoughts.
They are. If you fire someone for being incompetent it is not racial discrimination. If you fire that same person for being chinese then it is racial discrimination. Sure you can say, well if the person is incompetent then it's not racial discrimination and if they are competent then it is. But it's not that simple. What if they are incompetent and chinese? What if you fire only the incompetent chinese people but do not fire incompetent white people? To know if the discrimination is truly racially based (assuming the person doesn't admit it), is to know what the person is thinking.
Affirmative action is not based on thoughts. It just says you have to hire at least x% of each race. It doesn't care why you acted the way you did, only *that* you acted a certain way. Anti-discrimination laws punish the motive for an action, not the action itself. Firing a chinese person is not necessarily discrimination, it is only discrimination if you fired them *because* they were chinese, and that knowledge is private. Not hiring x% chinese people *is* against affirmative action even if you have no bias against chinese people.
Someone can refuse to perform a wedding for 2 gay people because he is simply overworked and it is not anti-gay discrimination. He can refuse to perform a wedding for 2 gay people because he hates gay people and now it is anti-gay discrimination. The actions are identical. The motives are different.
We can never legislate or enact perfect equality, but that does not mean its not worth preventing a decent into abject intolerance and discrimination.
I agree. But I don't think anti-discrimination laws are preventing us from falling into abject intolerance. I think maybe they did at one point. Now I think they prevent little discrimination and just serve to provide jobs to more lawyers. I think anti-discrimination laws are like training wheels for a society just getting over things like racism. At some point you have to take the training wheels off because they are only slowing you down. You never really know if you still need them until you try removing them.
Why do I think society (at least in the US) can survive without anti-discrimination laws? Well for one thing, discrimination is actually very unpopular. Even if people actually do it, they are careful to frame this discrimination in other terms (like religious freedom). In the past it was normal and accepted to support discrimination. Obviously there is still racism out there, and there always will be. That can't be the metric for deciding when we take the training wheels off.
I personally think that removing anti-discrimination laws will actually accelerate the demise of racism. It will allow people to be more honest. Bigots will be able to be honest about their bigotry, and other people will be more honest about their displeasure for bigotry. This is a debate/culture war that should be happening out in the open rather than behind closed doors. People need to see that it is not ok to be racist, not because of the law, but because it is morally wrong, and it is not acceptable to your fellow citizens (not just unacceptable to big government).
This is not a question of religious freedom. It is actually matter of private property and trespassing. If you don't want to hear what someone has to say, you are not obliged to on your own property because you have the right to make them leave, or have the cops remove them forcibly. If you are in a public space, you do not have the freedom to make everyone else shut up, so you don't have to hear any one else's religious beliefs. You do have the freedom to leave yourself. Public spaces are places where you are free to say whatever you want and not
free to prevent anyone else from doing the same.
Now the thing about going up to people's doors is a gray area, because technically it's on your property, but there is a convention that people are assumed tobe allowed on your doorstep until you tell them to leave. I suppose you can put a sign up indicating to people that they are trespassing, and you can theoretically have them arrested if they do not follow your sign. I don't know how well this works in practice.
If someone is pushing deities on the public street outside your house, I'd say they are free to do that, so long as they comply with local noise ordinances, etc.
Society is made of humans. "collective morality" just means it is the aggregate morality of the collective (i.e. the humans that comprise society). There is nothing utopian about it. If 99% of people think murder is wrong and that there should be a law against it, then this law is made.
Collectively doing something doesn't imply unanimity. Voting is an exercise in collective will. It doesn't mean every single person agrees on the outcome, in fact, usually a big fraction do not.
I don't think the concept of fairness is objective. Different people clearly have different concepts of fairness. Rich people believe equality of opportunity is fairness (not realizing they had more opportunities). Poor people think equality of outcome is fairness. I think allowing everyone to be a bigot is fair. Others think not allowing anyone to be a bigot is fair. Every freedom comes at the cost of a different freedom, and people value different freedoms. Maybe I just don;t value the right not to be discriminated against by individuals and businesses as highly as others. I only care that I am not discriminated against by the government. I think it would be nice if nobody discriminated, but I am skeptical of the benefit of laws designed to change people's attitudes. I think laws like this may even make things worse due to human psychology and people being stubborn when forced to do something. I would much rather bigots be allowed to be bigots and ridiculed by everyone else.
I consider the freedom of association to be both "of" and "from", in the sense that I think all associations should be mutual agreements, that either side is free to terminate at any time (e.g. like the right to get married). The right to marriage doesn't entail the right to force someone to marry you, but it does include the right to force someone to become divorced from you.
I think the term freedom from religion has 2 different connotations, one of which I am for and one which I am against. I totally support the freedom to not be part of a religion or the freedom to not have religion forced on you. I do not support the freedom to live in a world where others can not be religious.
And no, I don't think serving gay people unjustly violates your freedom. I think someone being fired for not serving gay people is just an instance of an employer choosing to exercise his/her freedom of association to terminate an association with a bigot, and I wish this was legal as well.
Poverty might be mutable in principle, but it doesn't mean that every single person is capable of changing it. Forcing a dress code is wealth discrimination, unless you provide people with slacks and sport coats that don't have them.
Incidentally, dress codes are a very common way that certain businesses use to discriminate against people they deem to be lower class.
Poll taxes were used to discriminate against black people indirectly, by "fairly" discriminating against poor people, who were disproportionately black.
I really have no idea what it is that you are arguing. Are you saying we as a society are not the creators of laws? I didn't think my statement of laws being made by humans was even remotely controversial.
Do you really believe that racism does no harm when it is confined in a home? It's not a coincidence that children who grow up in racist homes have ahigher chance of being racist themselves. Even if you do think nothing is lost by racism existing in the home, "in the home" is just a euphemism for racism in your personal life. Surely who you make friends with, who you treat like shit, who you call a racial slur has negative effects on society, even if they are confined to your personal (i.e. outside of any business setting) relationships with people.
You forget that such policies are applied equally to everyone.
They don't apply equally to everyone. They don't apply equally to people with and without shirts.
The question is not whether the rule applies equally to everyone, because any rule that excludes people is not going to apply equally to everyone by definition. The question is whether it should be allowed.
The simple act of purchasing a coffee does not violate anyone's religious freedoms
If by "religious freedom" you mean "the freedom to practice whatever religion you want", then no it doesn't. I think employers should be allowed to fire religious people for not doing their job for religious reasons. Some people think "religious freedom" means "The freedom to practice whatever religion you want without threat of being fired", or "the freedom to force my religion on other people", and I don't think anyone should have these sorts of freedoms because they are unjustly at the expense of the freedoms of others.
As to the bible, Jesus at with prostitutes and thieves. Apparently it didn't harm his religious beliefs in the slightest. Kind of a hard example to cite when one of the major religious figures supposedly ignored such separation and did the exact opposite.
The bible is not true. I don't think we should be using the Bible for any kind of guidance in terms of morality or law. The bible also says that people who work on the sabbath should be put to death and that homosexuals is an abomination along with shell fish. Fuck the Bible. It's trash. I do however respect anyone's right to believe it isn't.
Businesses that only let in people with proper attire and enough money are also discriminating, just based on different criteria.
You're being silly
What's silly about it?
Because you narrowly define freedom to refer only to an extreme interpretation of freedom of association, and not freedom from discrimination in public accommodations. Read the 14th Amendment for a different point of view.
I didn't narrowly define freedom. I am saying the freedom of association should trump the freedom not to be discriminated against by individuals and businesses. Just like freedom of speech trumps the freedom not to hear racist speech.
I am not saying that freedom to discriminate *is* freedom and freedom not to be discriminated against is *not* freedom. I am saying I think we should have one freedom at the expense of the other.
People working on behalf of the government should *not* have the freedom to discriminate or say racist things.
Nobody is talking about restricting freedom of speech.
I am talking about restricting freedom of speech as it relates to discrimination in the private sector, because I think it is perfectly analogous.
The question I am asking is "Why should it be that people can do in their homes as they please?". What is gained by allowing people to be racist in their own homes?
I'm talking about enforcing anti-discrimination laws, and you're talking about the Thought Police.
I'm not just talking about the thought police. I am also talking about actions as well. Some people probably choose friends and girl/boyfriends based on race, attractiveness, or wealth. Why should this form of discrimination be allowed? Isn't it bad too? What's different about it?
1st Amendment. You should have learned that in school.
The constitution is a law. We are the ones who create and uphold laws. We can change them if we think they are not up to our standards. As a society we don;t follow laws because they are laws. We make laws that reflect our collective morality.
The question of why should we allow free speech is not sufficiently answered by "Because of the first amendment". The question is "Why should we have the first amendment?"
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What is the advantage of doing this over bitcoin? Sure the price of bitcoin is highly volatile. The price of gold is highly volatile as well. If you tie the dollar to gold, the dollar becomes volatile as well.
The nice thing about bitcoin is that you skip the government middle man. You don't need to trust the government not to print more money than what it represents in gold reserves. You don't need to trust banks not to steal your money. You only have to trust that you can keep a secret password a secret. But then again you had to do that with online banking as well anyway.
Bitcoins are able to be used outside of an exchange. Casino chips can only be redeemed at the casino. In my example the casino chips represent GoxCoin (a promise of a bitcoin from mt gox), and the dollar represents a real bitcoin. The casino doesn't care if you keep the chip, as they are now worthless. Mt. Gox is not allowing people to withdraw money or real bitcoins. They are/were only allowing people to exchange promises of bitcoins (GoxCoins). This is similar to how a casino chip is a promise (which can be broken) of X dollars. Bitcoins at one point were trading at 5x the value of GoxCoins, which indicated that the market was only about 20% sure that Mt. Gox would ever allow withdrawals again.
Bitcoins must be "mined", and there are an effective 21M of them. That's stupid.
What is stupid about it?
Wouldn't transferring some bitcoins from your phone be more convenient than bringing a selection of gold and silver coins whenever you plan to buy something?
You can't get your money back from a person who steals your money and buries it at an undisclosed location either. Maybe you can get your money back in some other way (like through liquidation of assets, or wage garnishment), but then you could do that with bitcoin as well.
I much prefer a system where others can't take my money without my approval, over one where I am somewhat protected if a give my money to a crook by mistake.
It's not that I wouldn't like to be able to get my money back. It's that when you have this mechanism, you open the door to abuse. Governments can freeze the money in your bank account. They can take your car or house away if it was used to sell drugs (which are illegal but not immoral).
Every way to store/transact money carries risks. I accept the risk that people may break promises if I give them money. I prefer this risk to allowing the government authority to take my money through cooperation of my bank if they feel justified. If the government were a better arbiter of fairness, I might be convinced, but there are just as many crooks in the government as out on the streets.
How are you supposed to buy things from online stores with gold? File off some shavings into an envelope and mail order stuff from online? Are we really going to all carry gold and silver coins in our pockets when we go shopping?
Gold isn't really useful as a currency if it is just sitting in a vault.
What if you went to an Indian casino, exchanged your dollars for chips, and when you went to leave and cash out your remaining chips, they refused to exchange the chips for dollars, and instead decided to close shop. Would you still trust the dollar?
That's essentially analogous to what this article is asking. Maybe bitcoin has porblems. It's too volatile to be an effective unit of cost. Those are separate issues from the problems Mt. Gox is having.
Even the dollar has problems with corruption and cronyism involving the treasury, the fed, wallstreet, and too big to fail banks, that doesn't mean that an indian casino deciding to steal your money is due to any weakness in the dollar. That's just a business failing to uphold a promise either through theft or incompetence.
Mt Gox is a financial institution that didn't have it's shit together. Yes it dealt in bitcoins. It also dealt equally in dollars and other currencies (i.e. because it was an exchange). That doesn't mean it the dollar or bitcoin is weak. They still could be, but it's not because of Mt. Gox.
We don't *need* homosexuality to keep people from doing evil things, for the same reason we don't need beanie babies to prevent people from doing horrible things. Nobody ever claimed that homosexuality or beanie babies were stopping sociopaths from doing terrible things.
Unlike homosexuality and beanie babies. Some people actually do
claim that we need religion/Christianity to prevent sociopaths from acting out. This is when pointing out that we don;t need Christianity for this purpose becomes relevant.
So you want to ban one group while empowering another? hypocrite much??
I never said anything about banning anything.
I am not talking about the legal definition of discrimination. Obviously there are all sorts of discrimination that aren't referred to as such in law. Schools discriminate against kids who didn't study when they give them bad grades. The NBA discriminates against short people. But we can't use the law itself as a guide to what the law *should* be.
If the government can regulate what is thought and said in a private home regarding racism, what's to prevent the government from regulating what can be thought and said in a private home regarding religion, taxes, science, or any other topic?
Slippery slope arguments are always a bit tough to pull off. Even if the government never overstepped it's bound of only restricting racist discrimination in private, I think there is something gained by not giving the government his power.
What is gained by allowing people to be racist is a society where people are allowed autonomy. That is they are allowed to think their own thoughts and make their own decisions so long as it does not unjustly harm anyone else. It probably is not practical to offer 100% autonomy to people, but I would say that any restriction of autonomy should come with a very strong justification.
For example: "People may be offended by racial slurs" is not a string enough justification for restricting autonomy (i.e. freedom of speech).
I argue that: "People might not hire you because of your race" or "People might not serve you at a business because of your sexual orientation" is not enough justification for restricting autonomy either.
For me I am willing to restrict autonomy when someone's life is in danger, but probably not much else.
I am not advocating for it. I am saying that we shouldn't just take it for granted. I am saying that the rationale for the 1st amendment is important and it's scope is not limited to just speech. It is not sufficient to simply advocate free speech. We must know the reason why it is good in order to see if the same reasons apply anywhere else.
Any law that limits any of that is unconstitutional, and would immediately be thrown out by any judge worth wearing the robe.
As I have said before, I am not arguing that it is not illegal to violate the 1st amendment. The rationale for preserving a particular law should not simply be "because it's the law". We can change laws. It's not as if they are given to us by God. We must be capable of deciding what laws are good and why, and simply assuming the laws that already exist must be good or they wouldn't be there is not good enough.
What about "In God we Trust" on government and other public spaces and similar deity based proclamations?
It's not a violation of religious freedom per se. But it is a violation of the idea of separation of church and state. The 1st amendment is a bit ambiguous, but the supreme court has ruled that it is effectively enforcing separation of church and state. Maybe it's not a serious enough violation (or one that is easily fixed), and so the issue hasn't been pushed.
What about statements about God in the Pledge of Allegiance and other government "approved" songs and chants?
The pledge of allegiance should be removed from schools even if it didn't mention God. We should be teaching our kids to be critical thinkers, not forcing them to swear allegiance to a nation before they are even old enough to understand what it means. Needless to say, the government should not be in the song approval business.
1. If it is a big enough company (e.g. 20 people?), it will be made public because it's pretty hard to organize lots of people into enforcing institutionalized racism without this information getting out. For really small businesses, I think it will just have to be up to the businesses to be honest about their racism or up to yelpers to call them out. Honestly I don;t see a reason for store owners not to advertise their bigotry. If they are trying to make publicity, this helps. If they don't gays in their store, what better way than to tell them they are not welcome before they even come in?
2. I think this might have been a problem in the 50's or something. If anyone did that now there would even be republicans calling for boycotts of these businesses. This is exactly the sort of thing I would want to happen. I want to see bigots being bigots in public and being completely crushed in public discourse, and ruined financially. But I don;t think this is likely to happen with any big chains.
3. Absolutely. I think it may take some time to remove it from all money in circulation. I would personally be OK with just removing it from any newly printed money to save.......money.
So, being pragmatic, do you really think the current Congress, the leaders of most Southern USA states, and most of the "religious right" will support this?
Not today or tomorrow. But there is a very fast shift away from religiosity in this country. The only major religion that is actually growing in terms of relation to the population, is islam, and that's happening in africa, middle east, and asia. IN the US by far the fastest growing group is non religious. The percentage has doubled since 2006 (I believe is it like 8%->15%). I think there are a lot of people who are religious simply because they want to conform with the majority. Once non-religious people get to around 40% or so, there will be no clear majority and that will be the tipping point. All the people who believe in Christianity because it was the easiest thing to do in their community, will switch to believing in science as a religion instead (i.e. science is true because the scientists said so). This is probably not ideal, but it's better than the alternative. We had only 1 confirmed atheist in congress (pete stark who left office in 2013). This is going to change big time in the next decade or 2. The reason it hasn't happened already is because there are no districts with 50% atheists, like there are districts with 50% black, latino, asian, etc. Atheists don't clump together. So we don;t see any benefit from having 15% market share. But once this goes higher, it will be a different story.
I think we will start seeing big changes in 1 generation, and nearly a complete transformation by 2. It only took Europe about that long to go from the deferender of christianity to the most secular continent.
Replace the word shirt with black. If you think a "no shirt policy" is applied equally. Then a "no blacks" policy is applied equally as well. Granted one of these is definitely immoral and the other is likely not, but the mechanics of applying discrimination rules work the same way regardless of whether they are done in a sensible scenario or in a morally despicable scenario. They are both discrimination. Discrimination isn't always bad.
As to firing someone for practicing religion while working, absolutely they should be fired, if the employer doesn't allow such. It's still a private company, which company policy and employees excepted to perform and act within company guidelines.
I would go one step further and allow people to be fired for any reason, including just being a member of a religion, or being a bigot, or being anything. If the reason is good, then the community will support it. If it is not a good reason then the community might do a boycott or leave negative yelp reviews, etc. The point is that I think this kind of public shaming is a better mechanism for enforcing this kind of good behavior than laws. The law is pretty good at figuring out if you are guilty of murder. It is not good at figuring out if you are a bigot (because this is rather subjective).
I can't claim one way or another what is or isn't true in the bible,
Enough of it is ridiculously false that I think it's pretty safe to discount the entire thing as untrustworthy. I'm sure there is some stuff in the bible that must be trivially true, but even a broken clock is right twice a day.
You can find good stories in Lord of the rings that teach people to be moral as well. In fact in lord of the rings they don't condone slavery, rape, and genocide, so it's probably a better moral guide than the Bible.
That said, discrimination laws are not against thoughts.
They are. If you fire someone for being incompetent it is not racial discrimination. If you fire that same person for being chinese then it is racial discrimination. Sure you can say, well if the person is incompetent then it's not racial discrimination and if they are competent then it is. But it's not that simple. What if they are incompetent and chinese? What if you fire only the incompetent chinese people but do not fire incompetent white people? To know if the discrimination is truly racially based (assuming the person doesn't admit it), is to know what the person is thinking.
Affirmative action is not based on thoughts. It just says you have to hire at least x% of each race. It doesn't care why you acted the way you did, only *that* you acted a certain way. Anti-discrimination laws punish the motive for an action, not the action itself. Firing a chinese person is not necessarily discrimination, it is only discrimination if you fired them *because* they were chinese, and that knowledge is private. Not hiring x% chinese people *is* against affirmative action even if you have no bias against chinese people.
Someone can refuse to perform a wedding for 2 gay people because he is simply overworked and it is not anti-gay discrimination. He can refuse to perform a wedding for 2 gay people because he hates gay people and now it is anti-gay discrimination. The actions are identical. The motives are different.
We can never legislate or enact perfect equality, but that does not mean its not worth preventing a decent into abject intolerance and discrimination.
I agree. But I don't think anti-discrimination laws are preventing us from falling into abject intolerance. I think maybe they did at one point. Now I think they prevent little discrimination and just serve to provide jobs to more lawyers. I think anti-discrimination laws are like training wheels for a society just getting over things like racism. At some point you have to take the training wheels off because they are only slowing you down. You never really know if you still need them until you try removing them.
Why do I think society (at least in the US) can survive without anti-discrimination laws? Well for one thing, discrimination is actually very unpopular. Even if people actually do it, they are careful to frame this discrimination in other terms (like religious freedom). In the past it was normal and accepted to support discrimination. Obviously there is still racism out there, and there always will be. That can't be the metric for deciding when we take the training wheels off.
I personally think that removing anti-discrimination laws will actually accelerate the demise of racism. It will allow people to be more honest. Bigots will be able to be honest about their bigotry, and other people will be more honest about their displeasure for bigotry. This is a debate/culture war that should be happening out in the open rather than behind closed doors. People need to see that it is not ok to be racist, not because of the law, but because it is morally wrong, and it is not acceptable to your fellow citizens (not just unacceptable to big government).
This is not a question of religious freedom. It is actually matter of private property and trespassing. If you don't want to hear what someone has to say, you are not obliged to on your own property because you have the right to make them leave, or have the cops remove them forcibly. If you are in a public space, you do not have the freedom to make everyone else shut up, so you don't have to hear any one else's religious beliefs. You do have the freedom to leave yourself. Public spaces are places where you are free to say whatever you want and not
free to prevent anyone else from doing the same.
Now the thing about going up to people's doors is a gray area, because technically it's on your property, but there is a convention that people are assumed tobe allowed on your doorstep until you tell them to leave. I suppose you can put a sign up indicating to people that they are trespassing, and you can theoretically have them arrested if they do not follow your sign. I don't know how well this works in practice.
If someone is pushing deities on the public street outside your house, I'd say they are free to do that, so long as they comply with local noise ordinances, etc.
Society is made of humans. "collective morality" just means it is the aggregate morality of the collective (i.e. the humans that comprise society). There is nothing utopian about it. If 99% of people think murder is wrong and that there should be a law against it, then this law is made.
Collectively doing something doesn't imply unanimity. Voting is an exercise in collective will. It doesn't mean every single person agrees on the outcome, in fact, usually a big fraction do not.
I don't think the concept of fairness is objective. Different people clearly have different concepts of fairness. Rich people believe equality of opportunity is fairness (not realizing they had more opportunities). Poor people think equality of outcome is fairness. I think allowing everyone to be a bigot is fair. Others think not allowing anyone to be a bigot is fair. Every freedom comes at the cost of a different freedom, and people value different freedoms. Maybe I just don;t value the right not to be discriminated against by individuals and businesses as highly as others. I only care that I am not discriminated against by the government. I think it would be nice if nobody discriminated, but I am skeptical of the benefit of laws designed to change people's attitudes. I think laws like this may even make things worse due to human psychology and people being stubborn when forced to do something. I would much rather bigots be allowed to be bigots and ridiculed by everyone else.
I consider the freedom of association to be both "of" and "from", in the sense that I think all associations should be mutual agreements, that either side is free to terminate at any time (e.g. like the right to get married). The right to marriage doesn't entail the right to force someone to marry you, but it does include the right to force someone to become divorced from you.
I think the term freedom from religion has 2 different connotations, one of which I am for and one which I am against. I totally support the freedom to not be part of a religion or the freedom to not have religion forced on you. I do not support the freedom to live in a world where others can not be religious.
And no, I don't think serving gay people unjustly violates your freedom. I think someone being fired for not serving gay people is just an instance of an employer choosing to exercise his/her freedom of association to terminate an association with a bigot, and I wish this was legal as well.
Poverty might be mutable in principle, but it doesn't mean that every single person is capable of changing it. Forcing a dress code is wealth discrimination, unless you provide people with slacks and sport coats that don't have them.
Incidentally, dress codes are a very common way that certain businesses use to discriminate against people they deem to be lower class.
Poll taxes were used to discriminate against black people indirectly, by "fairly" discriminating against poor people, who were disproportionately black.
I really have no idea what it is that you are arguing. Are you saying we as a society are not the creators of laws? I didn't think my statement of laws being made by humans was even remotely controversial.
Do you really believe that racism does no harm when it is confined in a home? It's not a coincidence that children who grow up in racist homes have ahigher chance of being racist themselves. Even if you do think nothing is lost by racism existing in the home, "in the home" is just a euphemism for racism in your personal life. Surely who you make friends with, who you treat like shit, who you call a racial slur has negative effects on society, even if they are confined to your personal (i.e. outside of any business setting) relationships with people.
You forget that such policies are applied equally to everyone.
They don't apply equally to everyone. They don't apply equally to people with and without shirts.
The question is not whether the rule applies equally to everyone, because any rule that excludes people is not going to apply equally to everyone by definition. The question is whether it should be allowed.
The simple act of purchasing a coffee does not violate anyone's religious freedoms
If by "religious freedom" you mean "the freedom to practice whatever religion you want", then no it doesn't. I think employers should be allowed to fire religious people for not doing their job for religious reasons. Some people think "religious freedom" means "The freedom to practice whatever religion you want without threat of being fired", or "the freedom to force my religion on other people", and I don't think anyone should have these sorts of freedoms because they are unjustly at the expense of the freedoms of others.
As to the bible, Jesus at with prostitutes and thieves. Apparently it didn't harm his religious beliefs in the slightest. Kind of a hard example to cite when one of the major religious figures supposedly ignored such separation and did the exact opposite.
The bible is not true. I don't think we should be using the Bible for any kind of guidance in terms of morality or law. The bible also says that people who work on the sabbath should be put to death and that homosexuals is an abomination along with shell fish. Fuck the Bible. It's trash. I do however respect anyone's right to believe it isn't.
Businesses that only let in people with proper attire and enough money are also discriminating, just based on different criteria.
You're being silly
What's silly about it?
Because you narrowly define freedom to refer only to an extreme interpretation of freedom of association, and not freedom from discrimination in public accommodations. Read the 14th Amendment for a different point of view.
I didn't narrowly define freedom. I am saying the freedom of association should trump the freedom not to be discriminated against by individuals and businesses. Just like freedom of speech trumps the freedom not to hear racist speech.
I am not saying that freedom to discriminate *is* freedom and freedom not to be discriminated against is *not* freedom. I am saying I think we should have one freedom at the expense of the other.
People working on behalf of the government should *not* have the freedom to discriminate or say racist things.
Nobody is talking about restricting freedom of speech.
I am talking about restricting freedom of speech as it relates to discrimination in the private sector, because I think it is perfectly analogous.
The question I am asking is "Why should it be that people can do in their homes as they please?". What is gained by allowing people to be racist in their own homes?
I'm talking about enforcing anti-discrimination laws, and you're talking about the Thought Police.
I'm not just talking about the thought police. I am also talking about actions as well. Some people probably choose friends and girl/boyfriends based on race, attractiveness, or wealth. Why should this form of discrimination be allowed? Isn't it bad too? What's different about it?
1st Amendment. You should have learned that in school.
The constitution is a law. We are the ones who create and uphold laws. We can change them if we think they are not up to our standards. As a society we don;t follow laws because they are laws. We make laws that reflect our collective morality.
The question of why should we allow free speech is not sufficiently answered by "Because of the first amendment". The question is "Why should we have the first amendment?"