Contrast this recent Guardian comment piece by Peter Tatchell:
I’ve changed my mind on the gay cake row. Here’s why
Like most gay and equality campaigners, I initially condemned the Christian-run Ashers Bakery in Belfast over its refusal to produce a cake with a pro-gay marriage slogan for a gay customer, Gareth Lee. I supported his legal claim against Ashers and the subsequent verdict – the bakery was found guilty of discrimination last year. Now, two days before the case goes to appeal, I have changed my mind. Much as I wish to defend the gay community, I also want to defend freedom of conscience, expression and religion.
with this one from 2010:
Chris Grayling reveals the real Tories
… the right of B&B owners to turn away gay couples is an echo of the bad old days when some landlords used to stipulate: “No blacks, Irish, gays or dogs.”
The equality laws exist to protect everyone against discrimination.
But Grayling apparently believes that some people – homophobic people – should be above the law. Why this exception? After all, he does not agree with B&Bs refusing accommodation to black or Jewish couples. If race discrimination is wrong, why is Grayling saying that homophobic discrimination is right?
I am glad to see Mr Tatchell go from being wrong to being almost right. I am glad and surprised to see most of the Guardian commenters agree with me as to which is which. (I say “almost right” because he is still of the opinion that “Discrimination against people should be unlawful, but not against ideas”. One day I hope he will acknowledge that the distinction is meaningless. The former behaviour is as much an inherent human right as the latter.) I do not think it is coincidence that the older article was, as well as being wrong, badly argued. There were two howlers in the first three sentences. The article started with reference to the ‘the bad old days when some landlords used to stipulate: “No blacks, Irish, gays or dogs.”‘ It is difficult to prove a negative, but… nah. Never happened. Signs saying “No Irish” and “No blacks” certainly did exist. Signs saying “No xxxx or dogs” turn up everywhere on internet discussion boards but not so much in photographs. As for signs saying “no gays”, it would never have occurred to anyone in the bad old days to specify homosexuals as a group against whom one could wish to discriminate. By the time things got to the stage that anyone could think of gays as unwelcome – rather than as criminals – it was practically the good new days. A couple of lines later Mr Tatchell says, “But Grayling apparently believes that some people – homophobic people – should be above the law.” You would think that he of all people would be aware that peacefully advocating for legal change is the opposite of wanting anyone to be above the law.
And to be fair, it now looks as if he is.
Tatchell isn’t a typical totalitarian leftie, he shows regular hints of actual thought and sympathy for liberty and real equality (the before the law kind.) He’s still deeply confused, but just that – confused rather than wicked. And consequently, come the revolution, he’ll be one of the first the real lefties will stand up against a wall.
I would admire Tatchell’s change of mind more if the article did not strongly suggest to me that he has realised that sharia-law-supporters can force him and his friends to bake cakes expressive of _their_ views. Reading it, I got a strong impression that he has realised that his in-group might not be as in as the anti-islamophobes even now, and possibly still less so later. The biter is bit, the gander is in danger of becoming sauce. Milo was there long ago, and also was far more high-mindedly focussed on liberty, whether it profited him personally or not.
That said, let’s not carp unduly. How many of us have not been at least helped by the realisation that particular petty tyrannies will hit us personally. There’s more joy in heaven and all that – or is that one of those ideas Tatchell still thinks he can rule against. 🙂
(If so, let joy be unconfined – we can all heap coals of fire on his head until he gets that point too. 🙂 )
Peter T. is indeed improving.
As for the basic issue…..
The Emperor Diocletian was wrong.
A place of business being “open to the public” does not make it a “public place” in the sense of a “state place”.
A place of business is private property – just as a home is.
If a business wants to keep out (for example) bald men – that is their choice.
Yes they may be “bigots” – but that is NOT a crime, or a civil tort.
Imperial Roman Law was wrong – “common carriers” and “public accommodations” is nonsense.
Tatchell is someone whose instincts are often wrong but when he thinks about it, he is often right. Kudos for publicly changing his mind though.
Paul, whilst being a bigot is not yet a crime, expressions of bigotry (hate-speach=thought-crime) are being outlawed.
What we see here and in other places is not a master plan to over-regulate society, but a manifestation of little phobias combining to make a similar result. Each ’cause’ acts to increase the power of the center, because the ‘remedy’ for the ’cause’ is assumed to be some law to force all people to act as the activist wants. All these small causes add up to a mighty ‘mandate’ for governments to interfere, even though the activists were only seeking power for their individual concerns.
The only way to stop it would be to strengthen property rights so that people can practise discrimination if they want, regardless of hurt feelings. The thin-skinned should not be allowed to red-tape the rest of us! Rise up, my fellow Bigots, and reclaim property rights! (apologies to all those thin-skinned non-bigots, of course.)
I agree with the comments about Tatchell, who is not quite the Dave Spart he was made to seem in the 1980s.
As to the Northern Irish bakers, they did not refuse to serve a customer who was gay, they refused to bake a cake with a slogan which they found to be deeply offensive. Any notion that the law should force them to do so merely proves that Dickens was right, and the law is an ass.
Can a photographer who belongs to Greenpeace refuse an energy company’s request for a glossy brochure on their latest fracking operation?
Etymology goes against this. The use of “gay” to denote homosexuality didn’t reach mainstream use until the middle of the twentieth century. By then, Irish were unexceptional, so few landlords would jointly exclude Irish and gays. The signs, as described, were unlikely to exist.
It’s rather like having an ancient coin dated 257 B.C. The concept of B.C. didn’t exist then.
Hard cases make bad law.
The hard case was the pervasive social discrimination against blacks in the U.S. It was written into law, which could be abolished. But it was also entrenched in custom, and enforced by extra-legal intimidation. The enforcers were not a majority, but a determined and passionate minority. They were numerous enough, and had enough passive support that nothing less than state power could break their control.
Note that almost every defender of the sanctions cites the race-discrimination struggle. Religious discrimination is also cited.
This omits two very clear differences. Race discrimination (and to a great degree religious discrimination) is based on a distinction which is involuntary, unalterable, but without import. (In the traditional Jeffersonian view, it makes no practical difference what another’s religious belief is; at the same time, religious belief is a matter of such conscience that men died for it rather than change.)
Sexual preference is different. Some homosexuals apparently have no choice. But many clearly do: lesbian feminists, for instance, or Afghan mountaineers with their bacha bazi (“boy play”). And it has immediate real-world consequences.
The other difference is that the resistance in question is not to providing standard services or accommodations impartially, but to providing services directly associated with chosen behavior.
The elision of these differences is deliberate, IMO. It is intended force the general population to join in the enthusiasm (?) for homosexuality of the cultural elite.
To disapprove of race or (in general) religious affiliation is considered invidious. Homosexuality (which is defined by behavior) is being declared an equivalent quality – therefore no one may disapprove of homosexual behavior, even passively.
This is totalitarian, and it’s gratifying to see at least one supposed beneficiary rejecting it.
Chip, yes, a photographer with green notions not only can refuse un-green work but in today’s society there would be nothing surprising in a story that some photographic society had refused a tender to illustrate a pamphlet arguing against global warming theories because “big oil money is dirty and climate change is real”. You surely realise they would face no legal penalty – that the very idea of a case happening to them is absurd. The left love boycotts provided the cause is “socially just”. Nor do I have any problem with that, provided I have a free speech right to express my disdain. To be _compelled_ by force of law to do specific work commanded by another against your will is to be a slave. to be compelled to make public statements against your conscience is arguably worse – though one could say the first would always tend to include the second.
Ellen, kudos to you for correct etymology. There were of course other reasons why Peter Tatchell’s idea of a Victorian sign including ‘no gays’ is so laughable. Firstly, how would the landlady enforce this rule if lodgers did not volunteer such personal information. Secondly, no respectable landlady put up a sign saying “heterosexual unmarried couples seeking a place for some immoral canoodling welcomed’, which is the implication such a sign would have had. Everyone knew without signage that heterosexual activity outside the bounds of marriage was not openly solicited by respectable, or claiming to be respectable, establishments. There were discreet ways in which one could hint it might be winked at, and ways in which unrespectable establishments made their nature known; ditto for activities beyond.
By contrast, signs saying “Students of ancient Greek language, manners and mores welcomed” were never needed because of course such people were welcome everywhere.
Signs saying ‘No Irish’ did indeed appear in mid-Victorian America. These signs reflected social realities of their moment in time. When mass Irish immigration came to Boston, cholera, previously absent, also came to Boston, a consequence of the sanitation and living habits of Irish families fresh from rural and backward areas. Precisely _because_ modern-style PC did not rule back then, the Catholic church led efforts to get the Irish to assimilate to U.S. mores, and the Irish responded. After a while people began to talk of “the lace-curtain Irish” as against “the shanty Irish”. A while later, the signs started disappearing – the social reality they had reflected no longer existed. In 1890, you could still see no-Irish signs. By 1910, they were gone. No law was passed; no law was needed.
One wonders what the status of the Irish-descended would be in the U.S. today if “you can’t say that”, enforced by the state, had ‘protected’ them when they first arrived.
There are several typos in my comment above; my apologies. The misprint ‘bio oil’ for ‘big oil’ is the only one that might confuse. 🙂 [Corrected]
The point can be made that the ‘no gays’ sign idea is _even_ more absurd than I explain above. In Victorian times, for two men, or two women, to share a room or indeed a bed was normal; it was a poor society and everyone understood why it happened. For a man and a women to share a bed or a room or even a house without chaperonage was not respectable. In Owen Wister’s classic “The Virginian” (the original western book, that started the genre), the way in which the Virginian tricks the easterner (a travelling salesman IIRC) into fleeing the hotel bed they are sharing, so he can have it all to himself and get a good night’ sleep, is the first comic incident, establishing the Virginian’s character. Two men sharing a bed in the wild west? Nothing to see here, move along.
I wrote ‘Peter Tatchell’s idea of a Victorian sign including ‘no gays’’ above when it should have been ‘Chris Grayling’s idea of a sign including ‘no gays’’. Although Tatchell in the past, and probably still today, would be very capable of floating the same idea, I should have got it right.
I’ll now stop commenting on this thread, at least till I return to my usual standard of spelling. :-). Anyone with comment-correction privileges please feel free to correct the main comments and delete the corrections. 🙂
Well, maybe. One certainly did. Which is why if I asked you or anyone else to provide evidence they existed I know in advance what photo you’d link to: this one. It’s always the same photo, yet if such signs were commonplace we would expect to see more photos of them. But we don’t, which makes me doubt whether they existed at all apart from the one in the now infamous photo.
It may just be my suspicious nature, but Tim’s “infamous photo” looks like a fake to me.
1. The letters stand out clearly, indicating that the message is posted outside the window, not inside. If it was inside it’d be more indistinct – look at the curtains. What landlady posts her “No blacks” sign on the outside of the window ?
2. The lettering is incredibly neat, tidy and evenly spaced. The sort of messages ordinary folk stick up on their windows are much untidier.
Is there any evidence that this is a genuine photo of a genuine sign put up by a genuine landlady / lord ?
Here you go, Tim: http://jsh.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/07/03/jsh.shv066.abstract
“No Irish” I suspect was a euphemism then for “No Gypsies”, which would now itself be a euphemism for “No Travellers”, which presumably would now be an illegal sign to display, on the grounds of racism. We’re practically into angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin territory.
Here you go, Tim:
That has to do with “No Irish” signs in 19th and early 20th century America. Rather different from “No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish” signs in post-war Britain.
Tim Newman, your comment quotes the reference in my post to signs simply saying “No Blacks” or “No Irish”, but your picture has “No dogs” as well. It is the “No dogs” part that strains my credulity, not the others. Is that also your position?
I can believe that landlords might have rejected disliked groups of humans as tenants while simultaneously having a rule against dogs, but to publically forbid dogs on the same basis as forbidding the humans is an obvious insult. You’d be asking to get a brick through the window where the notice sat. I don’t think that’s the way twentieth century British racism worked.
Tim may be right to be sceptical regarding signs in post-war Britain. An account I once read written by a black guy in 1950s Britain stated that when he first arrived, he though for a long time that “there was no colour bar at all in the UK”. People seemed mostly polite and places open to others of his age seemed open to him. Eventually (my memory is after 18 months or so in 50s Britain) he became aware that, for example, a landlady might say politely that the room was taken and maybe mean that now she saw the skin colour of this applicant the room was taken. This kind of thing was not common but he and his friends had reason to suspected it sometimes happened. He never saw an overt ‘No Blacks need apply’ notice. That doesn’t guarantee not one single one ever existed, but if any did then they were for sure very rare.
Partly. The standard view of “No *insert noun of choice*” signs seems to be somewhat apocryphal, with their being commonplace accepted as incontrovertible truth. If you look at photos of the southern USA before the Civil Rights Era, there are plenty which show such signs. Ditto for South Africa. Ditto for Nazi Germany regarding the Jews. But when you look at photos of Britain between 1920 and 1980, you don’t see signs saying “No *insert noun of choice*” except for dogs (which you still see today). Do we even have any photos of signs saying No Irish? So it’s not so much that the “no dogs” part stretches my credibility, it’s the fact that there appear to be very few photos of any signs of this nature in Britain. I suspect what happened was that the sentiment existed in verbal form (i.e. the landlord just kicks them out or, more likely, ignores them until they leave) and somebody wishing to draw attention to the backward nature of Britain gone by wanted something a bit more robust to base his case on.
Yes, this. The British are not confrontational, they would much prefer to come up with a polite excuse such as this rather than post a sign saying “No blacks”. It’s where the We don’t serve your type in ‘ere line comes from. In other countries, they’d post a set of rules outside.
In one rather-famous case during WW2, when large numbers of US servicemen were stationed in the UK, a pub landlord in the West Country posted a sign in his window which said ‘This house is for Englishmen and Colored US servicemen only’, and enforced it, denying entry to all other US servicemen.
Apparently he’d had some trouble with the majority-ethnicity US troops, but no trouble at all with the minority-ethnicity US troops, who were posted there in construction battalions.
Wonder how he’d get on today.
What we’re all dancing around, because we’re trying to be nice, is stating the basic principle – that private actors should be able to decide who they will or will not associate with. This includes private business owners, and a private business owner does not become a public agent when he opens the doors of his business to the public. In other words, a business owner should be able to do business with whomever he chooses, or not do business with whomever he chooses, for any reason or no reason at all. If he wants to post a sign saying ‘No Irish’ or ‘No Blacks’, well, he’s made his position clear and everyone who passes may see just where he stands. To force a private business owner to do business with whomever the state says he must do business with is to make him an indentured servant of the state. Those who yell and scream that business owners must serve whoever the state says they must serve because ‘fairness’ forget that the state is fickle, and subject to the opinions of the mob, and that a state that can tell you who to serve one day can tell you who not to serve the next.
As others have pointed out in the past, much of Jim Crow in the US was the result of state laws, not private actions. To be sure, many people tacitly agreed with Jim Crow laws, but the fact remains that Jim Crow was enforced by the state every bit as much as it was by private actions.
All this brouhaha about cake baking and B&Bs would be easily redressed if a few motivated souls in the James O’Keefe mould would simply start going to Muslim-owned bakeries wearing a kippeh and ask for a wedding cake with the Star of David on it, or to black-owned bakeries wearing a KKK insignia and ask for a cake with a white-power message on it, or show up at a gay-owned B&B (what are the odds?) wearing Republican campaign swag, or walk into a black-owned laundry with a pile of KKK robes to be cleaned and pressed – and videotape the results.
llater,
llamas
@llamas
> All this brouhaha about cake baking and B&Bs would be easily redressed…
You are right llamas for sure. However, something that needs to be said about this British case and a similar one in the US is simply this: the gay couple who wanted the wedding cake? Why didn’t they just go across the street? Don’t get me wrong if you go to a town and discrimination means that you can’t find lodging anywhere because you are black or gay or female or have a dog, then you have a legitimate complaint, perhaps even one the government should address (though since they’d cock it up, not so much.) Of course the best way to get such systematic discrimination is to put it in the law books. For most business owners, green is their favorite color.
However, if you can buy your cake across the street then two questions: 1. what are they complaining about? and 2. why would a gay couple want to buy a cake from people who, allegedly, hated them?
The point being that the whole mess was a set up to make a political point and destroy the business of some hard working people because the gay couple objected to their politics. No doubt they deliberately targeted this business, it is unlikely to have been some random event.
The fact that that is taken seriously is terrifying.
Whenever I hear the argument that people involved in trade should not get to decide with whom he does business, I ask whether they think it should also apply to prostitutes.
Llamas, I’m not “nice” and I have never “danced around” that basic principle: freedom of association necessarily includes the freedom not to associate. Period. A government must treat all people equally, but not an individual or a private business. If someone wants to turn away profit in the service of some personal prejudice, that’s entirely his prerogative and it’s fine with me; I’ll just take my business elsewhere. (And that applies both to the individuals refused service and to those who support such individuals.) Why would you want to force someone who obviously dislikes you to provide you service? You can be certain that the service will be as sub-par as he can get away with. (I wouldn’t eat that cake!) Fraser is correct that all these high-profile cases are political set-ups.
Incidentally, this principle applies not just to anti-discrimination laws, but also to such things as no-smoking rules in private bars. My bar, my rules; if you don’t like them take your business elsewhere. I had just this argument, quite publicly, with members of my local city council when they were considering an outright ban on smoking in bars and restaurants. I lost.
A government must treat all people equally
another reason why government is a bad idea. As Mitt Romney would point out: governments, my friend, are people. Kim Davis is the great example here.
Don’t get me wrong if you go to a town and discrimination means that you can’t find lodging anywhere because you are black or gay or female or have a dog, then you have a legitimate complaint
No you don’t. There is no such thing as a “legitimate complaint”
they would much prefer to come up with a polite excuse such as this rather than post a sign saying “No blacks”
which is the only result of non-discrimination laws.
And 99 times out of 100, that “legitimate complaint” should be that some aspect of government is stifling competition, preventing your particular market niche (such as black gay women with dogs) from being catered to.
Niall Kilmartin – February 4, 2016 at 9:28 am:
Even the prosperous shared beds. In 1886, brothers Alf and Bob Taylor were the Republican and Democrat candidates for governor of Tennessee. They toured the state together, and often held a joint fiddle concert after debating. When the hotels were especially crowded (bear in mind the audiences mostly came by horse or wagon, and many needed to stay overnight), they would share a bed. (Bob won the election, 55%-45%. Alf also was elected governor, in 1920.)
When Abe Lincoln was “riding the circuit” as a young lawyer in Illinois, he often shared a bed with other lawyers. Recent “scholarship” has tried to twist this into evidence that he was a homosexual.
My apologies N. Grey.
I meant that being a bigot is not a crime under the principles of natural justice – as understood by the the Common Law that a crime must be an AGGRESSION just “harm” will not do.
Are you stealing someone’s stuff? No you are not offering them a job or trading with them.
The idea that this is a “crime” is one of the demented things of modern “law”.
If you mean me, no worries, Paul.
Can you confirm something that I have read- that some Jewish guesthouses had up signs saying ‘Non-Jews need not apply’? Or words to that effect? This would have been in Victorian London. Though not a Jew, I would approve of such demands as being in line with the rights of any property owner. If a landlord wants to limit his/her client list, it should not be my worry.
AngryTory,
I fail to understand. There are legitimate complaints surely? If you sell me a computer that doesn’t work then I do have a legitimate complaint against you. I don’t get.
Re Jewish ‘guest houses’. In an English Midlands city I know there is, or was, a lodging maintained by the Jewish community for visitors known to that Jewish community, who afaik, were invariably Jewish and often Israeli. Catering was run on kosher rules. In my lab, we had an Israeli boss, and one of his old colleagues from Israel came on a sabbatical for a year, and stayed in the lodging whilst he sorted a flat. He was one of the old school Socialists and a militant secularist. A few days after he left the lodging, our boss had an irate phone call asking why there was a pack of bacon left in the fridge.
I recall a few years ago having a lovely dinner in a Jewish restaurant in Krakow. Now, obviously, the food was kosher… I mean obviously. But what if you object to Kosher slaughter (or Halal come to that)? Well… Not far away was a gaff doing, a “Pig Knuckle Festival” (they had a sizeable menu if you liked pig knuckles). That’s the market for you. My wife and I went Jewish and I had most excellent carp. There is almost always, “Over the road” and if there isn’t then that is an interesting gap in the market is it not?
I live in a small place. It would be ludicrous for it to provide all things for all people. But… This is on the outskirts of Manchester where you can get anything really.
For many years , the Glencoe Inn at , you guessed it , Glencoe , allegedly had a sign above the door saying “No dogs or Campbells”. Apparently , a change of ownership has seen the inn move with the times.Dogs are now welcome.
Sean, I’d be cautious of believing in this alleged notice. I am Campbell-descended on the distaff side (albeit Cawdor Campbell, the least notorious of the three branches). My mother sometimes joked that she when she was younger and Macdonalds restaurants were new in the UK, she was apt to look over any MacDonalds she passed for a discreet little notice, “No Campbell need ask for service”, but she never saw one. 🙂
On the other hand, it is absolutely true that my grandfather was once thrown out of a house when it was discovered he was a Campbell. His ship was benighted on the west coast by vile weather and a local family invited them in and made them welcome – until has last name happened to arise in conversation. He was then briefly informed that the household were MacDonalds and “We haven’t forgotten” after which the door was pointedly shown him.
On the other hand again, my grandfather, when a teenager, while crossing London Bridge, happened to recall the end of Wallace and shouted out “Fa kilt William Wallace!”, to the great embarrassment of the Scot he was with and the utter incomprehension of the locals. So he could hardly talk. 🙂
NickM
I fail to understand. There are legitimate complaints surely?
originally I just meant with respect to accommodation. But really the principle applies more generally.
If you sell me a computer that doesn’t work then I do have a legitimate complaint against you. I don’t get.
Nope. Under the US Constitution or UK Common Law the judge should say “caveat emptor” and that would be the end of the matter. Any notion of “right” your want to “complain” about here is not a real right at all. I sold you the computer, you bought it, it’s yours. It’s your property. If it doesn’t work it’s your problem. Not mine.
Anything else is once again nothing but Communism.
Not necessarily true, AT. It depends upon the warranty you gave. If the sale is “as-is, where-is”, then yes, it’s caveat emptor. But without that specification there’s an “implied warranty of merchantability” which, while codified into statute today, arose under the common law (and even prior to that, under the Law Merchant).
Nick G and Mr Ed – my father answered this many years ago.
During one of his stays in hospital he complained about being served pork – “I am Jew” he said.
“But Dad you like bacon” I pointed out.
“That is totally different” Harry Marks explained.