Paul Coulam sees that a contempt for private property leads people to do some very strange and self-defeating things. Free association? Not any more.
Amazing as it may seem the government has today banned ‘gay clubs’ as a result of campaigning from the gay lobby.
According to the Times:
Hoteliers, bed-and-breakfast owners and pub landlords will no longer be able to bar gay people from their premises under new laws to be announced today […] The Government will accept today an amendment to its Equality Bill that will outlaw discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation in providing goods and services or organising public functions. The amendment […] will also mark the end of gay or lesbian-only clubs because bars and nightclubs will no longer be able to turn away straight people.
How stupid can these people be? Many gay businesses survive as such only because they can so explicitly discriminate, especially in their advertising. This ridiculous new law will be a very serious threat to the continuation of a ‘gay scene’ in many towns across the country. It is tricky to foresee all of the unintended consequences of this one. Gay clubs operate varying degrees of explicit discrimination depending on the locale or type of club. The strictest hard core gay cruise clubs generally operate a ‘men only’ door policy, which does the trick, but this itself may be or may become illegal – who knows what horrors of forced integration are still to come?
However many of the more general gay dance clubs operate what they advertise as a ‘gay majority policy’ which is usually employed to refuse entry to large parties of girls only. Gay clubs are often the best clubs in a particular town and tend to attract groups of girls who want a night away from predatory straight men. Of course the large numbers of unwary girls in these clubs itself attracts the straight men and before long the club has lost all appeal for gays. In the case of hotels there are lots of hotels in various, often remote, parts of the country that offer gay only accommodation and advertise as such. Will such advertising be illegal? In the short term after this absurd bill is passed clubs, bars and hotels will continue to operate discrimination informally but all it will take is some petulant activist or a council with a bee in its bonnet or some obsessive bureaucrat to stick their oar in to ruin some particular venue or business.
“How stupid can these people be?” asks Paul.
In a word: very.
These power-freaks don’t quite the concept of freedom of association, do they?
That would run afoul of gender-based anti-discrimination laws anyway. Gay or straight would have nothing to do with it.
Do we begin the countdown to the end of gender-specific restrooms, lockers, and change stalls?
Does it cover Scotland?
Well, in one way, good! I take great pleasure any time Tony B Liar gives an entire tranche of the British electorate cause to loathe him. This will piss those queens off right royally.
Sadly, this stupid law, as with so many others passed by this hissy little android, will never get repealed by the next government. The only thing the Tories could do, when coming back into office, is declare every law passed in the previous eight years null and void. That could be Tony’s legacy! Nothing!
Freedom of private property owners to decide who will enter a premise like a pub, disco, club or other place has been pretty much destroyed since WW2. Freedom of association is dead. This government does not see any difference between the public and private realms: in fact, it cheerfully wants to destroy that.
I keep quoting this guy because he was so far-sighted: the late Nick Budgen MP said that when Labour had ceased to nationalise the economy, it would instead nationalise people.
BTW, I have no doubt that the Tories, especially if led by David “nice guy” Cameron, will not reverse a single one of these dotty rules. Not one.
Freedom of private property owners to decide who will enter a premise like a pub, disco, club or other place has been pretty much destroyed since WW2. Freedom of association is dead.
Err, not really. I can invite anyone I want into my house and associate freely with them. This is a restriction on people doing business. I have no problem with places of business being considered as a semi-public places, although I don’t pretend that this is a libertarian stance. Yes, that is a restriction on private property – people are restricted from making money from their property. That’s the issue here, it’s nothing to do with freedom of association.
As it happens, thanks to the Criminal Justice Act, something far more iniquitous that anything Tony has done*, we do, in fact, have limited freedom of association. Especially if repetitive beats are involved 😐
*Well, except for the new terror legisation, screwing up the House of Lords, and abolishing the lord chancellor.
Hmm, I can only speak from my experiance of the gay clubs in birmingham, but in general the ‘chav’ lad element will advoid gay clubs like the plauge. Girls or no girls. Every gay club ive ever been in has never asked my sexuality on the door, how the hell could they prove it one way or another!! Im straight but have to say the atmosphere in gay clubs with my friends (who are gay) has always been a lot better than most other establishments. This law, like so many others will simply be ignored, both by the establishment and the people its supposed to benifit.
J, if you sold drinks in your house to paying customers, it would, for all intents and purposes, be deemed a public space by the regulators and they would try to force you to admit whoever wanted to come in. That is my point. A space that is privately owned like a pub no longer can decide its admissions policy.
In a free market, of course, this is not a problem since if bigoted people don’t want to admit blacks or gays to their bars, then those people will go elsewhere, and smart businessmen will realise this. Bigotry is a cost, and one of the reasons why, in the absence of government regulations like South African Apartheid or Jim Crow laws, such discrimination tends to reduce over time.
rgds
Pub comes from “public house.” It’s not a wholly private thing, almost by definition.
On the broader point of gay clubs, one argument that can be made is that if gay people want equal treatment then they now have it. It seems it has a downside as well as an upside.
EG
It means OPEN to the public, not OWNED by the public! It is ‘public’ only in the sense it is not a private members club. Talk about wilful misinterpretation!
I know what it means. It isn’t a wholly private thing, BECAUSE it’s open to the public. Unlike your house, for example.
EG
And why, just because a premises is open to the public, does the owner therefore lose all right to control who enters? He still owns it, his money is still at risk, he still pays taxes. Why are his preferences and his judgment of no value whatever? Under what collectivist theory is this valid or good?
Wrong. It is a wholly private thing that happens to be open to the public. People enter and leave only with the permission of the owner. When inside they behave according to the owners terms. The permission is implicit in this case (unlike with my house), but the fact of ownership is not diminished for that.
Would you prefer it if we called it a “bar?” Because then it could “bar” entrants “almost by definition?”
What an irrelevant comment.
What Robert Speirs said.
It is the business acumen of the owner of the public house that will determine whether it is a success or not. A bunch of wussies who have never held a real job in their lives have no business making business decisions on behalf of taxpayers.
People enjoy being among their own kind. It is human nature. Gays want to relax around other gays, and they want to know that if they put the moves on someone, it will be another gay guy, not a straight man who will back away in horror. This is grossly stupid. Why are we not surprised.
Which by definition means it isn’t wholly private. It’s privately OWNED, but that’s where the wholly private bit ends.
EG
Jonathan,
…the late Nick Budgen MP said that when Labour had ceased to nationalise the economy, it would instead nationalise people.
Do you have a source? I’ve said similar things myself, but I could really use that on Tories in the ID campaign.
I totally agree with the write on an individual rights level, i.e. the libertarian perspective, but still, concerning the last point, I understand straight guys spectating in lesbian clubs, but I really don’t think that gay guys will be bothered by straight people assaulting their clubs.
Yes, yes, all very clever we’re sure, but you were responding to this comment:
So the “privately owned” is the “private” that’s relevant to the discussion, I’m afraid. This, by the way, is an example of you changing the terms of the discussion when it suits you.
You must be kidding! When I go to a club the last thing I want to worry about is “is this sex-god available or is he going to have an explosion of violent straightness if I chat him up?” Straight guys in our hang outs IS a problem because our places are usually nicer that the shitty boozer down the road and so all sorts of people tend to wander in. Jesus, why do you THINK we go to our own clubs?
My house is also open to the public then because I often invite other people in to it. And that is what I want to do with a business as well. Invite people in. Or not. Otherwise it is NOT my property and I really don’t own it at all, which no doubt sounds just fine to a thief or a statist (but I repeat myself).
“I can invite anyone I want into my house and associate freely with them”
Not if NuLabour’s thought police get their way!
So I assume that all of you who are in favor of the right of gay clubs to discriminate against straights are also in favor of the right of straight establishments to discriminate against gays?
Answering for myself – I am in favor of the right of any privately-owned club to discriminate against whomever it does not wish to admit. So yes, that includes both gay clubs barring straights and straight clubs barring gays.
Of course! How could you think otherwise? I think the rights of the property owner are paramount and they must be the sole arbitors of whom they wish to associate or dis-associate with, even if the reasons are (in my view) absurd and/or vile.
In the university town I used to live in the main gay (and lesbian) bar was popular with everybody (especially on weekends). There were big signs by the door saying everybody was welcome but that straight guys had no right to get upset if another guy started hitting on them (and there were bouncers to back that up).
There was (for a short time) a lesbian only bar that wanted to have a women-only policy and some guys (obviously having no idea of lesbian realities) challenged that policy. I forget how that ended.
I’d feel better about the idea of private business people being able to turn away clientele on the basis of sex or race or religion if I hadn’t grown up in a time and place where that was a predominant practice.
You are not supposed to feel ‘better’ about it because racism and social intolerance are not good things… they just should not be things which attract the violence of the state to prevent them.
I think if a person puts a sign on his bar saying “NO JEWS, BLACKS, GAYS, ALIEN ABDUCTEES or CAT OWNERS ADMITTED” he should be perfectly entitled to do so. And I should be perfectly entitled to refuse to do business with him, organise boycotts, put up flyers deploring his actions etc, etc.
However no one has the right to use the violence of law to prevent him from acting on his moronic views on his own property. Hell, what he is really doing is making a market opportunity for a rival bar that caters for black jewish gays who own cats and were once abducted by aliens.
Perry – tour de force!
It is the property owner’s incontestible right to make arbitrary decisions about who they admit to their premises, and what kind of an aggressive little lefty dipshit would want to go out and spend an evening in a place where he was patently unwelcome? The whole notion is lunatic.
I have never had any problem with men having clubs that ban women. So what? They want some time off among their own sex, and that’s now a crime?
And obviously, Perry is correct. When you ban a group of people, you create a business opportunity for the bar/restaurant/shop across the street. That is how life works among normal human beings. Not engineered by some godawful regulation-mad local council or the diktats of Cherie “I woulda worked in a shop” Blair.
some obsessive bureaucrat to stick their ore in
I meant ‘oar’ of course. I really should learn to spell properly.
Perry is quite right though I am not as suspicious of other peoples motives for discrimination as him. So long as people keep the exercise of their prejudices within the confines of libertarain side-constraints then I don’t think that their motives are necessarily any more ‘absurd’ or ‘vile’ than any exercise of free choice on the market.
One of the great virtues of libertarianism is that it gives un-PC groups like homophobes and white separatists their own space as much as gays and blacks.
…and, indeed, black separatists and straight-haters as well.
“One of the great virtues of libertarianism is that it gives un-PC groups like homophobes and white separatists their own space …. ”
.”..and, indeed, black separatists and straight-haters as well. ”
What the world needs now, is hate sweet hate, that’s the only thing that there’s just too little of …
The hate’s already there. We’re just trying to avoid legislated love.
“What the world needs now, is hate sweet hate, that’s the only thing that there’s just too little of …”.
Even if you had found a last word to rhyme with hate, this vapid shot wouldn’t have found its mark. A landlord doesn’t necessarily hate people he discourages from coming into his establishment. He may not want a group of gays coming in regularly because his straight customers, who are the vast majority, may feel uneasy around them and go somewhere ele. Same with any other group.
Most gay bars don’t mind women, but some don’t want us at all, and it their absolute right to stop me at the door and say women aren’t allowed. I don’t have some notional “right” to try to force my way in anyway.
Why won’t these “human rights” morons give it a rest and accept that people on private premises have a right to make their own damn’ rules, no matter how apparently unjust?
Guy, I came across the quote here from Budgen. I also heard him say something pretty similar at a Libertarian Alliance conference in the early 90s.
Here is a link.(Link) Just scroll down.
On an entirely unrelated, but perhaps a little pertinent in the greater scheme of an overly interfering government.
(I offer this)
On the original topic, does it not say above the door to all pubs something along the lines of ‘the owner/publican reserves the right to refuse admission to any one he feels like not letting in’ ?.
And is there not a law which is of the essence that he must keep order within the pub ?
So are these regulations no longer valid ?
I reckon its’ the policy of some nobber who sees his job disappearing in the next Civil Service shake up unless he can claim to be head of the ‘new anti-discriminatory pub regulations enforcement bureau’, which he just happened to create to ensure compliance with his diktat.
More ‘job’ creation for people who do not want to work in the world outside Government. It is big, but its not terribly clever.
Later
No doubt this also renders illegal LGBT charities like Stonewall Housing Association, who aim to provide a temporary housing service to gay people with support needs. They receive some funding from the Government through the Supporting People programme, but presumably this will now stop.