The Whitehouse press secretary was required to leave a restaurant because the restaurant owner did not like her views. This seems like a perfectly civilised and non-violent way of objecting to views or actions. A restaurant owner should be free to require people to leave for any reason; the restaurant is private property.
The Guardian article quotes Walter Shaub‘s tweet:
There’s no ethics rule against Sarah Sanders fans being cartoonish hypocrites in defending merchants discriminating against gay people but howling when a merchant rejects a human rights violator based on her involvement in harming babies & children. Ridicule will have to suffice.
The Guardian article does not mention the obvious response:
Conservatives aren’t arguing the restaurant didn’t have the right. Not asking for the government to step in and force the restaurant to serve her. Not going to the Supreme Court either. Let the free market decide.
It is surprising how often it is necessary to spell out the difference between not liking something and wanting the state to intervene to stop it.
Her mistake was that she didnt insist on them preparing a cake for a gay wedding.
It was pointed out at another blog that conservatives simply cannot bring themselves to play the game. Perhaps Sanders position prevents her from initiating the correct response, but that response should be to organize a boycott of the Red Hen restaurant (is that name a Marxist trope) and street demonstrations outside its entrance. Demonstrations outside the owners home are also in order. This has nothing at all to do with individual rights or libertarian principles or freedom of association. It is a cold civil war for the future of the US, and people on the right need to stop lying down and start fighting the war we are in. Make the left fear us.
A black woman was required to leave a restaurant because the restaurant owner did not like the color of her skin. This seems like a perfectly civilised and non-violent way of objecting to something. A restaurant owner should be free to require people to leave for any reason; the restaurant is private property.
This is your position? Just confirming.
The lady has done nothing – the lady was ejected from the business because of what-she-is. A business owner should have the right to do this – in the same way that a business owner, a scumbag business owner, should have the right to eject people because they have black skin.
It is the Guardian newspaper that it being a hypocrite – because it does not accept this, and continues to support the 1964 America Act and the 1965 British Act and later, and more extreme, British Acts.
Either, as the Emperor Diocletian claimed, a business being “open to the public” makes it a “public matter”, meaning a GOVERNMENT matter, or it does not. If it does than the lady can not be ejected from the business for being a conservative and working for the President of the United States, and if it does not – then, scumbag, business owners may eject people on the basis of the colour of their skin.
Of course there is also a deeper hypocrisy in play here – the Guardian (like the rest of the “mainstream media”) is made up of socialists, indeed egalitarians (supporters of Social Justice – equality income and wealth) yet they receive high incomes from the capitalist system – just as the socialists of the New York Times (the de facto American sister publication of the Guardian) do. They square this circle in their minds by the doctrine that they are destroying-the-capitalist-system-from-within.
In their system the restaurant owner would not own the restaurant (not in any meaningful sense) and would, as manager, have much the same income as the cleaner (if there is a cleaner) – the restaurant chain owners do not seem to have grasped what modern “liberalism” (Progressivism) is intended to lead to. They will understand it all one day – when the Social Justice tide of migrants “redistribute” their income and wealth.
The correct response is to wait & see which other restaurant owners virtue-signal in favour of the Red Hen. Then…ICE raids all around.
@ Mr Black, who wrote:
‘A black woman was required to leave a restaurant because the restaurant owner did not like the color of her skin. This seems like a perfectly civilised and non-violent way of objecting to something. A restaurant owner should be free to require people to leave for any reason; the restaurant is private property.
This is your position? Just confirming.’
Not sure at whom this question was directed, but in the spirit of furthering the discussion – if you asked me that question, my reply would be – yes, that is my position. His house, his rules.
Now, I get to add to that, and say, when I say his house, his rules, I mean just that. It’s the decision of the private property owner, and nobody else gets to make his decision for him.
Jim Crow laws were wrong because they forced the owners of private businesses to refuse service to black patrons, regardless of the dictates of their consciences.
But if it is wrong to force business owners not to serve some patrons, even if they want to, then it is every-bit-as-wrong to force business owners to serve people, even if they don’t want to.
We can all despise and reject the decisions that a business owner chooses to make. I think anyone who refuses service to a black patron just because they are black is a moral defective and a scumbag. I think anyone who refuses to bake a cake for a gay wedding out of religious conviction is an easily-deluded fool who believes in Bronze Age mythology enough to turn away business because it might offend Big Sky Being. But those are my opinions. And I don’t get to impose my opinions on others by force. I have no right to their goods or their services, just as they have no right to mine. And neither of us has the right to co-opt the forces of the state to compel the other to deal with us if we do not wish to. Anything else is abject servitude to whatever mob opinion happens to be in the ascendant at the time. Remember, it was popular opinion that introduced and supported Jim Crow laws. When you make laws about what transactions may not or must be performed, you make those transactions subject to a transient popularity contest voted on by the mob. I don’t think that’s a safe or secure guarantee of my rights or anybody else’s.
llater,
llamas
It’s only someone missing out on a meal in a restaurant because of a silly, pompous owner.
Things are much worse here.
In the UK we’ve seen the police, social workers and the justice system show extreme reluctance to serve some victims of crimes such as child sex abuse and FGM.
That is really serious political and social prejudice.
Mr “Black~” or more accurately Mr Red– the business owner can ask someone to fuck off from their property for ANY reason they prefer.
Are you here peddling Cultural Marxist evil? That race/faith/Sex antics/ leftist(ie scum) politics are not grounds to expel–but non-CM approved beliefs are.
Increasingly in seems to me that civil war is the only way to finally settle matters. The Western world is infested by middle-class cultural marxist scum whose degree of arrogance and whose depth of evil and sanctimony take the breath away.
One problem with Mr Black’s search-and-replace trick is that on some topics I might spend a lot more time explaining how much I disagreed with the restaurant owner on the topic at hand (something a bit like Llamas’s last paragraph, perhaps) before going on to talk about private property.
I made a slight edit to somewhat narrow what I consider “civilised”.
Years ago I learned that my downstairs neighbor had been using heroin provided by her new boyfriend—I think she had been arrested for it; at any rate she was no longer in the apartment. I said to a friend to whom I mentioned this that I didn’t think addicts were desirable neighbors, but I didn’t think they should be imprisoned. She thought I was being inconsistent. . . .
I believe that commenters here who are saying that a business owner can eject someone from their property on the basis of race mean that in their view that is what a business owner ought to be able to do in a regime based on liberty and freedom of association, and not that, in the US, a business owner can do that, because under existing US law, it can’t. It can eject Sanders because political views or political deeds are not one of the “protected classes” enumerated in the US statute.
In the US, our entire anti-discrimination regime has become ridiculous because every group that demands “protected” status analogizes its claims to those of black Americans. Unlike commenters here, I think it is appropriate in the US that business ought not to be able to discriminate against blacks, owing to the unique history of blacks in this country. However, the situation of blacks is entirely sui generis and does not support claims-by-analogy of any other group.
Yes indeed. And presumably all the people cheering this restaurant will now rally around next baker who chooses not to bake a cake for someone, right? I mean, if it’s ok to discriminate based of your world view who you do business with, well then…
Yes, it should not be a matter for law, unless they made a reservation that was accepted by the restaurant & were not told ‘no blacks’ at the time. I would not eat as such a place, indeed I would hope all decent people would boycott such an establishment, but that should be a matter for civil society to work out.
I’d be happy with limited state intervention in the case of arbitrary refusal of service due to race, gender etc, which requires any decision to do so to be stated in advance outside the business.
This is simply because a free market requires full information and I’d like to be able to avoid using a service that only serves me because of my appearance or gender, and I’m prepared to take some extra inconvenience or cost for this as its a value I am prepared to support.
Of course if my radical right-wing views such as not buying from bigots offend a left-wing business owner. They don’t need to publish that before banning me. That’s still their choice and not arbitrary (stupid but not arbitrary).
I also find myself, repeatedly, needing to explain that having the right to do something doesn’t mean that they have carte blanche with zero repercussions to do something.
Just because you CAN do something doesn’t mean you SHOULD do that something.
I CAN walk down a dark alley late at night with money hanging out of my pocket. That doesn’t mean I SHOULD.
I CAN go to the Philippines and bad-mouth the pope. I don’t recommend that to anyone non-suicidal.
I CAN eat two-week old sushi. You get the picture.
And yes, a private restaurant CAN be assholes and allow personal politics to take precedent over financial business wisdom, that doesn’t mean one necessarily should. You have to pick your battles and be prepared to pay the price of your moral outrage.
I’m fine with people getting what they ask for. The “take a knee” crowd deserves the condemnation they asked for, and the Red Hen deserves the bad press they bargained for.
And for the record, the “cake guy” didn’t refuse to sell a cake for a gay wedding, he just didn’t have time (or so he said) to bake a new one, and offered other already prepared cakes to choose from. Apparently this was enough to gain the ire of those on a quest to be offended.
Watchman wrote,
I disagree. You’re merely tranfering requirements to serve to requirements to post notice. ‘Personally, as a person who truly believes in Rights of Association, I think a PRIVATE business should be able to do anything short of volating people’s liberty rights or commit fraud. Liberty rights are the rights to act rather than the alleged right to have. (“Positive” rights don’t in fact exist since they’re self-contradictory).
rejects a human rights violator based on her involvement in harming babies & children
WHat does this person think a press secretary does?
And as an added note, I’d much rather be asked to leave a restaurant than to have someone suffering from Pathological Leftism spit in my food…or worse. Much for the same reason I support free speech. I WANT TO KNOW who the people are who have thought about blowing up the white house, (Ahem…Madonna).
I WANT to know that Ashley Judd is insane (and a naaaaasty woman), and that Mel Gibson is not only a fraud pretending to be a New Yorker rather than an Aussie, but also an insane quasi-neo-nazi. Etc.
Everyone has the right to refuse service to, or to associate with, whomever they please. Is everyone who does so right? Well, that depends on why they’re doing it.
In the case of the famous bakers, I think that yes, they were right, not least because it turns out (as if it weren’t blatantly obvious from the outset) that they were being deliberately provoked; the customers knew it would offend their faith, and it was their intention to do so. In this instance, I think the restaurant owner is an idiot – especially since she seems to expect anonymity, for some reason – but I still wouldn’t say her action was wrong per se. Ultimately, her ire is directed at Ms. Sanders personally, albeit because of her association with the President. She doesn’t like her. Fair enough. And that’s why, although I’d still defend the right to do so, it would be wrong to refuse service to a black person purely on the grounds that he is black: you’re not judging the man, you’re judging what you believe to be the man.
“our entire anti-discrimination regime has become ridiculous because every group that demands “protected” status”
Yes. It seems to me to be based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation. As I said above, it’s intent that matters, not the status of the individual(s) concerned. If, instead of saying that you have the right to dissociate from anyone you please, but if it’s based prejudice that’s morally wrong and should face sanctions not from the state but from society itself, you say that certain groups of people who have historically been the subjects of prejudice are now protected by law, you end up with a hierarchy of privileges under the law. Which flies in the face of one of the basic principles of the enlightenment.
Of course, every business owner should be able to choose who they want to do business with.*
The legal situation in the USA is different, however, and in my tit-for-tat ethical code, Sarah Sanders is not only justified, but obliged to take legal action against the Red Hen.
Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
Also, for good measure, what bob sykes said.
* But what about somebody who made a reservation at a top restaurant, drove 2h to get there, only to be told “Sorry, we don’t serve East Asian people”? I’ll leave that to Harvard to debate.
And since when did you stop beating your wife?
(NB: the use of “was” instead of “is” strongly implies that the event actually happened. If that is not what he meant, then he should make it clear.)
Turnaround is fair play:
Two points. Why did she seek to dine in such a foul Leftie eating hole? Thailover is right.
If she had a booking, throwing her out is a repudiation of the contract for no basis that the law should recognise and damages might be an inadequate remedy. Why not specific performance? Did the restaurant make clear in advance that the lady was not welcome? I doubt that it is in their terms as to who may dine there.
Interesting thoughts you have.
Suppose a shop owner exercised his/her free citizen rights to eject someone by reason of their:-
Nationality?
Gender?
Religion?
Level of affluence?
Pinkness of skin?
Waistband?
IQ?
Ability to remember lists of stuff like this?
How strong would such an excluder’s “rights” be?
Shouldn’t this shopowner post a list of potential excludees onthe door?
“A black woman was required to leave a restaurant because…’
Oh my, I HOPE so…
It guarantees a clientele for the new joint when I open up across the street.
My BIG issue is OTHER potential clients that don’t care about other paying customers they sit next to.
“ALL of a sudden”, my joint would be overwhelmed, I’d have to hire more people, expand the place, expand the menu (ugh), and after the FIRST owner went out of business, I’d have TONS of cash, and no time/place to enjoy it!
*sigh* I’d be FORCED to buy the shuttered/ pre fixtured, competition’s old joint from the bank for pennies on the dollar, JUST to survive the traditionally crowded hours of the day.
Of course this plan falls apart when word gets around, and folks who heard about the ox tails and collard greens come from miles away.
I’d have to open joints in the neighboring towns JUST to keep ’em from overwhelming my FIRST two joints during rush hour… AGAIN, more money than I had time to enjoy…so….
I’ve been led to believe that Ray Kroc’s widow recently gave $1,000,000,000 to The Salvation Army.
I have some sympathy for the restaurant here, they should be free to act in accordance with their principles and I do not think any business should be obliged to offer their services to state propagandists like Sanders.
There are those that lament the lack of civility in what the restaurant did, as if US politics was somehow ‘civil’ before this happened.
There is an ethics rule against the PC being steaming hypocrites – it’s called ‘sauce for the goose’. I strongly suspect Walter Shaub sort-of knows this and his tweet was about getting his insolent denial in first. I suspect the Grauniad also sort-of knows this, so quoted it precisely because they saw it was useful for that.
I suspect he has not even that uneasy semi-conscious awareness about contrasting “gay people” with “human rights violator”. He knows very well that those particular “gay people” did not by mere mischance happen on those particular bakers but are exactly as Sam Duncan describes them, but he wholeheartedly approves their aggression: diversity of opinion must be hunted down wherever it still survives. He knows just as well that Sarah Sanders, nazi-lookalike, exists only in PC logic, but the idea of that not being revealed truth is one of those diverse opinions that deep-stater Shaub’s office existed to end.
As for the point of this post – that Sarah did not threaten the Red Hen’s owner’s with court, and we do not want to live in a world where such laws still rule and only the list of protected categories is switched from Walter’s to ours – I expect Walter could serve as a textbook example of how the PC have no comprehension of how those they hate think.
We very much do not desire it. We want to live in freedom. Every now and then, alas, wanting to live in peace requires waging and winning a war. Where these latest insolently hypocritical aggressions will end I do not know. It would be best if they so discredited their authors’ politics at the polls that nothing more were be needed – so, like Walter, I hope that
I think that to leftists, there is no line of demarcation in their heads between “not liking something” and “calling the State to intervene.” If there’s anything they don’t like, they think the State should step in and force people to do what they (leftists) think is right.
A few observations:
Sanders wasn’t bodily “thrown out”, the implication being that there was a violent altercation. She was politely asked to leave, and did so without complaint or incident. I would have done the same. If my business weren’t wanted, especially in a restaurant, I’d leave promptly before something nasty was done to my food. And the sort of place which would ask you to leave based solely on politics is exactly the sort of place where such would occur.
It has been suggested here that the “proper” response would have been to organize a boycott. I don’t think that would have been “proper” at all for Sanders; she is an important government official and needs to be seen as being above such things. But the right-wing crowd has effectively done this. They have flooded social media with talk of this; the restaurant’s Yelp page was flooded with bad reviews; similarly, its Facebook page received a huge number of angry comments; and its answering service was so inundated with calls (some rather obscene, from what I’ve heard) that they had to shut it down temporarily. To me this seems a disproportionate response, but if you wanted a boycott you pretty much got one.
Also, it was very quickly learned who the restaurant’s owners are, and it turns out that one is the Chairwoman of the local Chamber of Commerce. That has been the recipient of petitions demanding her resignation. Again, to me this seems overkill.
I have heard that in the days following this incident the restaurant has seen few patrons. Perhaps that will end as the outrage dissipates and things return to normal. Perhaps not. In either case, as long as there is no governmental interference this is market forces at work, which is precisely the correct result. Whether or not the restaurant survives, lessons will have been learned.
Hi Laird, don’t remember hearing from you for a while, good to see you back!
That thought occurred to me … and no doubt to others on this site, and elsewhere.
Not to me!
What Laird (June 25, 2018 at 8:58 pm) describes is well within my call for ‘ridicule’, albeit slightly tangential to it. That said, when the left were freaking out about Chick-fil-A a few years back, Instapundit (IIRC) said that the left were good at loud boycotts, which thrive on the willingness to demonstrate hatred, whereas the right were better at loud support (eating often at Chick-fil-A, for example). I think Instapundit had a point – and, as a certain Alinsky once said, a good tactic is one your people enjoy.
Laird, I think “thrown out” is widely understood to mean ‘obliged to leave’ without an assumption of physical violence. From Sander’s tweet and responses, I certainly had no such impression.
Relevant to the discussion of whether any reaction to the restaurant owner’s acts are overkill or not:
It now appears that, after Sanders’ party left the Red Hen, her in-laws – without Sanders – proceeded across the street to another restaurant to eat.
The Red Hen owner (allegedly) followed them over, and organized a protest to get them kicked out of that second restaurant.
Here’s hoping that the Red Hen has good security on their food supply chain all the way up the line.
“The owner of the Red Hen —because nobody’s told this — then followed them across the street, called people and organized a protest, yelling and screaming at them from outside the restaurant and creating this scene,” said Huckabee. One of Sanders’ in-laws, whom he described as “very liberal,” walked out and said, “Look, I don’t like Trump, I’m not a supporter, I’m a far — considered liberal — but you guys are embarrassing me and you’re not helping the cause.
Laird: “as long as there is no governmental interference this is market forces at work”
Does the President tweeting about it count as government interference? 🙄
The owner’s preferences are not the only consideration. Suppose I own a successful nightclub where white people hook up. A group of Muslim youths turn up at the door. If I admit them, my clientele will go elsewhere, and I would quite like to stay in business. Am I allowed to refuse entry?
Yes. Freedom of association also means the freedom to discriminate. As the owner, you need to make the decision you think is best for yourself and your business. You might be wrong in turning them away (e.g. there’s a demographic change in the area as muslim immigrants move in and white flight occurs), or you could be correct. It’s your right to make the decision, and your right to be wrong.
The word ‘discriminate’ has itself been under attack. It used to be a neutral term, but has been tinged with negativity and made into a perjorative in recent times.
I’m with Laird on this one. I too would have quietly left, and I too think the response has been massively overblown. Some petty little nobody does something petty and small to another person that caused them minor inconvenience? That happens to me every day driving down the street. It doesn’t make the restaurant owner any less petty, and it is perfectly fine to advertise her pettiness, but really? In the great scheme of things it doesn’t seem all that much.
Of course I think the reaction is the biting hypocrisy of the whole thing especially so close to the gay wedding cake thing. However, I should point out that it isn’t much different than the cases of restaurant owners refusing to serve cops (though mostly in those cases it is was spotty faced teenagers rather than owners doing the banning), or a recent case of a pharmacist who refused to fill a prescription for an abortiofacient. My reaction to most of these cases is “there are a million restaurants/pharmacists/cake bakers, why not just go to a different one? Who wants to be served food or drugs by someone who hates you or thinks you are immoral anyway?”
Of course the reason is that it isn’t about cakes or burgers or drugs, it is about crying foul, declaring the evil of your enemy, being offended as much as possible, screaming your outrage, and, often, particularly screaming at the the utter abomination of “Trump as President.”
And I think the second biggest compounding factor, besides the shocking hypocrisy, is the claim about Sanders being a baby molester/murderer/snatcher. When those who aren’t utterly befuddled by the cacophonous press, know that it is a huge storm in a tea cup. Terrible optics about the perfunctory.
Given the shocking, and growing behavior of the left, doxing, confronting in public, death threats, and the never ending bleating of Maxine Waters, I suggest that the best course of action of those who hate the left is to allow them to be hoist on their own petard. Doing it back to them seems a very poor choice both morally and tactically.
Actually, this could have been done in an inoffensive manner. Just have all the chairs in the restaurant fitted with knockout gas dispensers, apply them to offending parties, and take them outside for some fresh air to revive them.
Via Wendy McElroy this seems very relevant —
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2018/06/25/liberals-hatred-will-inevitably-turn-into-violence-n2494043
Yes, this. Precisely this. They do not understand the difference at all.
If it’s OK for a restaurant to refuse to serve Sanders, then it should be OK for a restaurant to allow people to smoke on its premises.
Bob Sykes at the top of this thread nails it. The owner was within his/her rights , just as others would be in their rights to boycott the place, name and shame.
Recently Starbucks got heat for ejecting people using the place without being a customer but strangely I don’t recall progressives complaining about infringement of Starbucks’ property rights. Nor did I recall the Left objecting to pubs being forced to ban smokers. Etc.
In practice it’s always best to leave things to civil society. I can understand why, after a century of Jim Crow, it was thought necessary to impose a few rules, given the outrageous situation before. But today surely the default should be “my house, my rules”.
Actress Mae West once said: “There ain’t such a thing as bad publicity”.
An interesting question would be: will the restaurant get more business or less as a result of this incident?
I for one wish them to fail and close.
Another thought: would it be acceptable to throw out say an obese customer? Or a cripple? Claiming the owner and staff don’t like such people, and, moreover, their presence might be unpleasant to other customers.
Jim Crow was, of course, largely government rules.
The local bus companies funded a campaign against the separate seating law. These companies were owned by southern whites who in no way were outliers to the culture of that time and place, but their attitudes as managers of a bus company effortlessly overrode any attitudes they might have had as southern whites. It had to be a state law precisely because the whites making the free market decisions did not want to do it.
For reasons such as Roué le Jour (June 25, 2018 at 11:20 pm) mentioned, some restaurants, by contrast, made such decisions then and now. It probably offended the Ren Hen woman mightily to think of her or her staff serving Sanders, as if her servant. I daresay in the old South there were white managers and waiters who were similarly offended at the thought of serving blacks.
Any moral comparison between what happened to Sarah sanders and the refusal of service to somebody on the basis of ethnicity or sexuality id entirely erroneous. Mrs sanders was being judged on the content of her character, not the colour of her skin. I wish the restaurant well.
Category error detected: the issue is one of property rights, so unless there is prior contract, the owner should be allowed to decide who they do business with for ANY reason, no matter how irrational, objectionable and bizarre it might seem to someone else.
And in any case, I suspect the bakers we all have in mind would argue sexual identity is just as much a matter of character as working for a government you might disapprove of.
This is only true to the extent that you accept that government ought to be regulating our right of association vis-a-vis categorization of people based on immutable characteristics.
To someone who implicitly accepts that this is a proper exercise of governmental power, the equating of [excluding jerks] with [excluding blacks] is fundamentally, and obviously, wrong. But it is entirely premised upon that belief.
If you instead believe that government should not be able to use its coercive power to tell us with whom we must associate, then there is no difference between the two.
So, it’s not “entirely erroneous.” To call it that is to simply refuse to accept that there are other viewpoints about the proper role of government.
erroneous
I never claimed otherwise. I simply said that there is no moral comparison.
Mila s (June 26, 2018 at 10:58 am), note that back in those days, such undoubtedly-Democrat-voting white southerners as restricted whom they would serve in their restaurants believed (correctly) that southern blacks, when able to vote at all, had a marked tendency to vote Republican. If you had asked those century-ago whites why they refused to serve blacks, they would not have said it was because the colour black confused them or spoilt the decor or set off their migraine. They would have made statements alleging that black was just the indicator of certain behaviours and mentalities.
This observation does not completely void your remark about characteristics that are strictly ‘immutable’ but it does put it in a restrictive context. It would take me more time to black up my skin for the day than to don a MAGA hat, but it is quite doable. The reverse is not equally true – black is a harder skin-tone to whiten than the reverse – but in the modern world, where the PC want to regulate ever more categories, and in the name of resisting micro-aggression to watch for their own set of indicators, ‘immutable’ is often itself a somewhat mutable concept.
The problem with the “Some petty little nobody” idea is that letting them get away with it emboldens other petty little nobodies and pretty soon Gavrilo Princip appears.
WRT Mila’s remark:
This is a valid point … or at least, it seems valid to me, IF taken at face value; that is, if it means that the 2 kinds of discrimination are not comparable: one can find both morally reprehensible, but it must be for different reasons.
Mila’s previous comment, however, implies that this is not what she meant.
“I simply said that there is no moral comparison.”
That depends entirely upon your personal definition of morality. If it’s based on (supposedly) immutable factors such as ethnicity, skin tone or sexual preference (although I don’t accept that sexual preference is necessarily immutable), then the statement is correct. But if your definition of morality is based on property rights and laissez faire (as is mine; to me, property is derived from human activity and any interference with them is a human rights violation tantamount to endorsing slavery), then the statement is erroneous. As Perry said, category error.
black is a harder skin-tone to whiten than the reverse
I disagree, the actions of people like a certain Mr Zimmerman, a certain Ms Kardashian-West and a certain Duchess of Sussex, have relegated entire ethnic groupings from one classification in a very short time.
I think Sanders got off lightly, any leftist “warrior” worth their salt would have put something nasty in the food.
I am reminded of when Jane Fonda was refused service in a restaurant due to her politics. IIRC this happened in Montana, Wyoming or Idaho, back when she was married to Ted Turner.
PS As for “put something nasty in her food”, Jesse Jackson once said that when he worked as a waiter, he’d spit in peoples’ food before serving them.
black is a harder skin-tone to whiten than the reverse
Oh rly? 😀
(Editor: changed your image as that one blew up the comments)
Roué le Jour @ June 25, 2018 at 11:20 pm:
Many Moslems are “white”. There are millions of Bosniaks and Turks and Egyptians and Lebanese who are indistiguishable from typical south Europeans, such as Greeks, Italians, and Spaniards, or from “dark” northern Europeans. (E.g. my Swedish grandfather, who had a swarthy complexion and coarse black hair.)
The other point that hypocrites like Shaub choose to ignore is that there is a difference between refusing a common service to a person for a characteristic completely unconnected with that service, and refusing provision of a service that would amount to participation in expressive conduct which the provider disapproves of.
The Red Hen proprietor was flagrantly uncivil when he refused service to Ms. Huckabee and her party for an ordinary meal. But I think he would not be so if he refused to rent his private dining area (if he has one) for a Trump fund-raising dinner. Or if he refused to provide take-out food for a Trump campaign office.
And race, unlike conduct, is immutable and involuntary. There is no conduct fixedly associated with race. Religion and sexual preference are not, but we choose to treat them as if they were. A provider refusing service to a person or group because of that person’s religious or sexually motivated conduct has a better case. I.e. must an Evangelican Christian restaurant serve Mormon missionaries on campaign?
I think @mila’s point is interesting, and worth thinking about. Some people have made good points above — for example, Mila seems to assume that everyone shares her moral code, which is patently not true. But to take her specific point that discrimination on the basis of immutable characteristics verses ones of choice — that is to say “character” one might consider a few specific choices people make:
* Is it ok to refuse service to someone who chooses to be a muslim?
* Is it ok to refuse service to someone who was born male but has chosen to transition to female?
* Is it ok to refuse service to a policeman?
* Is it ok to refuse service to a member of the military?
* Is it ok to refuse service to a mom who brings her baby?
* What about if said mom decides to breastfeed her baby?
* Is it ok to refuse service to someone who has chosen to enter the country illegally?
* Is it ok to refuse service to someone who has chosen to marry a person of the same sex?
* Is it ok to refuse to give abortiofacients to someone who, through poor choices, got pregnant?
These are just some I can think of off the top of my head. FWIW, my answer to all of the above is yes, you can refuse service to whomever you chose, even though it may well make you a rather nasty person. (But again, if the person is nasty why on earth would you give them your business, since there are almost certainly a dozen other comparable businesses who will gladly serve you with a cherry on top?)
What say you @Mila?
One small quibble. I have known many gay people over my lifetime, and I cannot think of one who chose to be gay. They may choose to engage or not engage in homosexual relations, but underlying this, the direction of their sex drive was hardwired. Could you, yourself, choose to become sexually aroused by members of your own sex? I know I couldn’t, so I doubt that choice is being exercised.
Think about the historical hardships and dangers associated with being gay in much of the world over the past centuries. Do you honestly think that people would subsume a natural state of heterosexuality and choose to suffer the indignities and hatred to which we’ve subjected gays – voluntarily?
(I would admit that, in the last ten years, many of those indignities have been quelled, and it may now have become a fashion choice for some people to declare that they’re gay, but that was never the case before.)
The correct conservative response was Okay and move on.
Just as a slightly humorous endcap to this story:
The Red Hen owner had been the director of the local business association, but she was forced out today.
In the immediately surrounding area, one finds these things:
– a Military College
– the city of Lexington that went for Trump 78% – 22%
– various counties that went for Trump 75% – 25%
She’s decidedly unpopular amongst her local business peers today. My daughter in D.C. says the restaurant is too far out from the D.C. area for the SJW’s to rush in and support it. Local reaction says the business is toast.
All without government action. The market is a wondrous thing.
Kooks will be kooks. Don’t make them into ideologues.
Don’t be too swift about the SJWs. They have a move on to remove Lee’s name from Washington & Lee which is located in Lexington. Good Law School. I took a Bar Exam course there in 1952 that resulted in admission to the Bar after the first two years at U.Va. Law.
bobby b (June 27, 2018 at 1:50 am), three quibbles about your reasoning, the first two fairly irrelevant to the main thread, the third more relevant.
1) My experience (UK culture, especially university settings) is as follows. In the 80s, being gay was “an equally valid lifestyle choice” and if you questioned that, you were a vile homophobe who should have the decency to conceal his filthy feelings if he could not cure himself of them. Sometime in the 90s, quite suddenly, it changed to being “born that way”; gays were ‘women born in men’s bodies’ and suggesting there was any kind of choice involved meant you were a vile homophobe who should have the decency to conceal his filthy opinions if he could not cure himself of them. Then, in 2015 IIRC, being gay abruptly changed to being one of many choosable identities. Choice was back and if you dared to suggest that anyone was born innately anything then you were a vile homophobicly-bigoted transphobe who should have the decency to conceal his filthy attitudes if he could not cure himself of them. By precedent, I am expecting it to become a vile prejudice to believe in self-chosen sexual identities sometime in the 2030s. My first quibble is therefore to note that even if you were right about the underlying state, the PC will sometimes insist you are, and sometimes insist you are not.
2) It is suggested by some modern Scots historians that the puritan kirk-sessions system set up by John Knox et al quite unintentionally increased homosexual behaviour. The vigour with which the kirk session would pursue the father of any unexplained newborn child caused some young men to choose the kind of sex that could not have that consequence. (More generally, history is full of laws broken despite terrible penalties, but while some may be ‘born’ murderers I feel sure that many others made a choice, and others made character choices throughout their lives that naturally ended in crime.) Where the PC allow us to debate it at all, the debate will continue – with the points you mentioned legitimately included in it.
3) In a restaurant, the average punter (if gay), has far more choice in how loudly or otherwise they advertise the fact than has either a black man, as regards others noticing that he is black, or Sarah Sanders, as regards others noticing that she is the president’s press secretary. Gayness is therefore more mutable as regards how one is perceived in a restaurant. So if anyone defends laws on whom restaurants may and may not serve on the grounds of immutability, additional complexities of definition arise.
Niall: afaik it is sexual identity that is considered a “choice” nowadays, not sexual orientation. Even for sexual identity, my understanding of current doctrine is that it is not just a choice, but the only possible choice, meaning that an individual is born with a given sexual identity, usually but not always corresponding to objective reality, and experiences discomfort when xer identity does not match reality; so xe chooses sex reassignment. As Seligman wrote in What You Can Change…and What You Can’t, we don’t know how to change the identity, so we change the body instead (my words, not an exact quote).
WRT sexual orientation, Seligman distinguishes between bisexuals and strict homosexuals; the latter almost only men, i believe. It is possible for bisexuals to shift from favoring one sex to favoring the other, with effort; for strict homosexual men, taking an interest in women seems to be practically impossible.
This fact, by itself, does not prove that sexual orientation is genetically determined, however.
@bobby b
> All without government action. The market is a wondrous thing.
I’m curious bobby: much though I agree that the incident with Ms. Sanders was not very nice at all, do you think that it is just that the restaurant actually be driven out of business for this? That seems a pretty severe over reaction to me. I don’t share the restaurant’s animus to Ms. Sanders so wouldn’t have done the same, though I certainly reserve the right to do so. But if I compare and contrast with Masterpiece Cake, who declined to make a wedding cake for a gay couple — I presume you agree that they should be allowed to make such a choice, and presumably suffer the market consequences of doing so. Would you think it was just if this cake shop was driven out of business because of their views on gay wedding cakes? Some have, and I think it is tragic, even though I think their attitudes to gay weddings is stupid and narrow minded. I equally see no reason to wish the destruction of this small business in Virginia. In fact I am a little horrified at the baying for her blood from the right seen both here and in the news media.
BTW, a question for those who think the baker had no right to refuse to make the cake for the gay wedding — I wonder how they would feel if a bakery, run by a gay couple, had refused to make a cake for an anti gay rally? I wonder if they feel that, in exchange for the right to do business in Colorado, that they should be obliged to pipe “God Hates Fags” onto a nice piece of confectionery?
To me, as an advocate of free speech and free association, the attitude is the same as on the left — free speech (as long as I agree with what you say), and free association (as long as I’m not offended by your choices.)
Fraser, I don’t know that I would use the word “just” in any description of this entire incident.
The hard left has set a course to deny society to anyone not firmly within their philosophical camp. I can’t speak on a campus without violent interference. I can’t place a Trump sticker on my car without risking my paint. I can’t place a conservative campaign sign outside my house without risking that house. I can’t wear a MAGA hat into a restaurant and expect to be served. I can’t speak on Twitter or Facebook without hiding my views. I risk my employment if anyone focuses on my views. Banks withhold their services from one of my businesses for political reasons. Schools teach that I am evil. Ministers preach that I am evil. People sit outside the residences of my co-believers and bang drums and harass neighbors in order to pressure them away. Large groups surround us and scream in our faces and threaten our children if we are seen in public places.
What happened to this one business owner who chose to act in accordance with the new leftist paradigm was entirely predictable. If I step out in front of a speeding truck, I get flattened. I wouldn’t call that “just.” I would call it “stupid.”
This is all working up to the equivalent of a religious war, in which “justice” is defined differently by each side and there is no true justice accomplished by either, simply predictable consequences.
Here‘s an interesting Fox video detailing some of the consequences of this woman’s actions, to her, to her business, and to the neighboring businesses. (Sounds like the Red Hen is now closed until sometime in July, and the entire town of Lexington is in crisis.)
The closest I can see this incident approaching “just” will be if people all over see what they risk, and some of this thuggish behavior is thus avoided in the future. This is critical; one side has been practicing violence without restraint, and the other side is about to join in, and it’s going to be hard to step back if that happens.
And, “just” or not, I’m experiencing satisfying levels of schadenfreude out of this.
What do you mean by ‘driven out of business‘? If not enough people dine there, it will surely close barring some private funding, that’s not being driven out of business, it’s just economics. There are no market forces, just market choices.
No one is suggesting that it be forced to close by law, or threats, albeit reportedly someone threw some chicken manure over it when it was closed. If as a business you choose to go into the restaurant trade, you will need, barring an effective monopoly (whether by law or circumstances), to attract customers. Bawling out someone who had booked a table is hardly a flying start, and doing so to someone nationally known and because of her job strikes me as being putting up a sign saying ‘I am an intolerant fanatic who may throw you out of my restaurant and even when done, cross the street to harass you because I hate you despite never having met you.”.
Call that a business plan?
Perhaps the local chapter of those good old Democrats the KKK and friends and allies will turn up and make the place a cause celebre, but I somehow doubt it. Wasn’t it Thailover who said here some time back that these people want us DEAD? It’s true, the Left would kill us if they could, they are just too weak at the moment, for now.
JUSt<blockquote
Just conduct?>
IF, as there are plausible arguments,JUSTICE is the performance of obligations, then consideration of conduct as just, vel-non, may turn on further consideration of its relation to obligations; which, in turn would lead to consideration of the obligations, their nature and how they arise.
Fraser Orr, June 27, 2018 at 2:38 pm, the degree of aggression shown in refusing service seems relevant. As I understand it, the cake shop will sell existing cakes to any customer. They refused an order to express (in the form of artistic cake design) an opinion that they did not hold. Someone above contrasted the actual Red Hen case with a hypothetical one in which it was asked to be the venue for a Trump rally and refused in a reasonably professional manner. That seems nearer the masterpiece cake shop example.
As it is, the Red Hen owner refused standard service and apparently followed the party out and abused them in the nearby restaurant they repaired to. This would be as if the masterpiece cake owners refused angrily to let their gay visitors buy anything whatever and then followed them to a nearby cake shop while shouting, “You filthy perverts” over and over. If that had been the case, I would not call anyone a PC bigot if their enthusiasm for masterpiece cakes were sensibly diminished. (I did not write, “in that case it would be just if the market forced them to close” because of the technical point that ‘the market” is not a person or a conspiracy, and so the meaningfulness of describing the net outcome of many individual free choices as ‘just’ is questionable. But I can imagine saying – colloquially, as it were – that such a predictable outcome of such behaviour was not unjust.)
“And race, unlike conduct, is immutable and involuntary…”
But but but, there is No Such Thing as race. Which is nice, since therefore I can’t be a racist.
@Mr Ed
> What do you mean by ‘driven out of business‘? If not enough people dine there, it will surely close
Yeah, I don’t think that is what is happening though. It is a concerted, organized movement from people who would never dine there, because they don’t live close enough, to literally drive them out of business over something that amounts to a rather unpleasant act or rudeness.
The whole thing reminds me of road rage, and in fact it is the manifestation in civil society of the Internet equivalent of road rage, which is to say psycho commenters. Road rage comes about because, being in an isolation booth of your car, the normal social pressures to keep your emotions and reactions in bounds is stripped away and left unchecked. And sometimes, when cooked up enough, bursts out into some of the terrible road range incidents we have all read about.
When someone cuts me off in traffic, it might piss me off, but I don’t feel the need to chase them down and kill them and all their family. A sense of proportion is necessary.
So I don’t really agree it is normal market forces. It is the politicization, the road ragification of everything. How are we to react? Just because there are other road ragers on the road does that mean that we need to turn up the heat whenever someone cuts us off? Or are we sensible enough just to avoid them and get on with our lives. That seems to have been the approach taken by the Sanders family, and good for them. Personally, I loved the President’s response — very Trumpian.
And remember, we are libertarians (or most of us are) and so we absolutely defend the right of this woman to kick Sanders out if she wants.
Do I understand the bobby b’s schadenfreude when hypocrites are hoist on their own petard? Sure. But somebody needs to be the adult here, right? Or have we already conceded that civil war is the only way forward? Is it OK to demand reasonable behavior, or have we already passed that point and we are in an ever escalating tit for tat war until there is actual blood on the streets?
I have heard some of my leftie friends asking for advice about firearms because the want to go get themselves a gun for self defense. The irony notwithstanding, that is a little scary.
What? You have lefty friends?! Enough of this conversation! Begone, commie scum! 😉
I like the road rage analogy, but I think it misses by a hair. It’s not uncontrollable rage driving this – it’s more the perception held by fanatics on each side that they have been granted some social permission to act this way. They don’t feel like thugs. They feel like . . . warriors.
De-escalation is going to necessarily involve somehow revoking that permission on both sides. Up until recently, there’s been no reason for the mild left to put an effort into revoking its permission to lefty fanatics, because the entire price has been paid by the non-left. A tit-for-tat war might change that.
So far, the right has been subdued in its response. This episode has been the first all-out rage response I’ve seen. Already, left politicians are publicly calling for a backing-off – something they’ve not done before.
If the trashing of this restaurant is what accomplishes revocation of the left’s sanction on thuggish attacks, it’s a small price.
Niall — very well put. Bakers carrying on like a wet hen *g* is an apt analogy; and a good point about “the market’s” ability to produce “just” outcomes.
I’m pretty sure I see what you’re getting at, but then I see contrary arguments, depending of course on the exact meaning of “just” the wrier or speaker has in mind.
Actually, I daresay that what one would mean if saying such a thing in a case like this would be that that the lowlife “got what he or she deserved,” on the principle of “sauce for the goose.”
.
Meanwhile, getting out of the weeds and back into the green, “it is difficult to argue” with Mr Ed’s take. Also bobby’s.
Fraser, the video to which bobby gives the link is very much on point, and introduces some information not given in the basic account.
I think that people’s outrage is understandable, especially considering the way the Wet Hen and her ilk treat us anti-lefties and non-libruls.
NOTE–The Machine sent my comment on without my permission. Will try to finish it:
I too notice some of the Dems’ criticism of some of their cohorts’ bad behavior. In particular, they seem to have an urge to put a sock on Mizz Waters’s emphatically stated ideas for ameliorating the situation vis-á-vis the existence of the non-librul, non-left, non-Dem contingent. I see that even the odious Palosi is among them. That’s okay, I’d probably take Mad Maxine off my dinner-party list myself.
@bobby b
> it’s more the perception held by fanatics on each side that they have been granted some social permission to act this way. They don’t feel like thugs. They feel like . . . warriors.
Yeah, that is the point though. In road rage, or in commenter rage in the net, people are isolated from the normal social moderation mechanisms. But (and I have to say I think the Internet is to blame for this too) people are fragmented into echo chambers, and it is within these echo chambers that they find the social support that you astutely point out underlies this. Only people who never actually meet Trump voters can call them Nazis. (And the echo chambers on the right are just as isolated, though I think as a general rule the right thinks the left is “badly wrong”, and the left thinks the right is “bad people.”)
I think it was most clearly apparent in Charlottesville. Obviously there were some loathsome Nazis there, and rightly to be condemned for their loathsomeness, and the left did. But they were so blinded by their ideology that they could not see how utterly loathsome the ANTIFA thugs were. Good god, one of them was caught on tape firing a flamethrower at the opposition. ( The opposite was true also, though to a much smaller extent. The right did blind themselves a little to the loathsome Nazis in their hatred of ANTIFA.)
> De-escalation is going to necessarily involve somehow revoking that permission on both sides. Up until recently, there’s been no reason for the mild left to put an effort into revoking its permission to lefty fanatics, because the entire price has been paid by the non-left. A tit-for-tat war might change that.
But I think the middle is captive to the edges. If Chuck Schumer were to repudiate the outrageous behavior that would not have a moderating influence, it was simply exile him. The whack jobs on the edges don’t consider the middle to be their leader, in fact, I think they are deeply suspicious of their slimeiness. (And on that point they are right.) Why did Schumer call out Maxine Waters? Not because what she said was bad, but because he thought it might impact the voting of the middle.
@Julie
> Fraser, the video to which bobby gives the link is very much on point, and introduces some information not given in the basic account.
I watched it and frankly I think it is extremely supportive of the point I was making. Other businesses in Lexington are getting caught up in the collateral damage? Other unrelated “Red Hen” restaurants too? Horrifying! And then it goes on to show the outrageous behavior of Waters and her ilk? Are we to model our behavior on her? Follow her strategy only from the other side of the political divide? She is an odious person, and the last person I’d want to copy or model my strategy on.
Just to be clear, my arguments sound super supportive of Trump. There is plenty I don’t like about that guy for sure, but I see him as a means to an end. If he can keep a majority in November, I think we will see policies that are good for the country long term (lower taxes, fixes to the healthcare system, some improvements on the border, better judges, less regulation) traded only for a few of the nasty things going down in his term. I think we could see 4% GDP growth continually for a few years if Trump stays in office and gets a bit more leverage in Congress. In Pelosi gets the gavel, the whole thing will grind to a halt.
BTW, something that I have been thinking about is this. Trump is a mildly conservative politician with some streaks of libertarianism, and some of authoritarianism. Look at the reaction to him. The FBI, the CIA actually ganged up to try to bring him down. It is like something out of a bad political novel. Can you imagine what would happen if an actual libertarian took the Presidency or a significant control in the congress. Obviously never going to happen, but can you imagine?
BTW, apologies to the mostly British readers here for comments so completely USA centered.
No need to apologise Fraser (see last sentence of Fraser Orr at June 28, 2018 at 4:07 am). We in the UK have similar (or worse) problems and US information is of use, and of interest. (Please accept my apologies for grammar-nazi-punctuating your following quote. 🙂 )
This, it seems to me, is the situation we must avoid on our side. You are, of course, correct that the push-back the Red Hen is getting is a bit more organised than just many individuals making wholly independent choices not to eat there. I and others have suggested particular reasons why this additional push-back is nothing to restrain as yet. (Except that several restaurants have the name ‘Red Hen’ and instapundit et al are rightly trying to ensure that the others are not inconvenienced.) But what we must maintain is the culture that makes it legitimate to ask, “Was that a step too far?” The curse of the left – that harms them as well as us – is the culture in which the merest discussion of moderation is treason.
(Julie near Chicago, FYI I purged your disobedient-machine-submitted comment. This happens sometimes and I purge the earlier one when I notice an undoubted case of duplication.)
“Mr Black
June 25, 2018 at 12:25 pm
A black woman was required to leave a restaurant because the restaurant owner did not like the color of her skin. This seems like a perfectly civilised and non-violent way of objecting to something. A restaurant owner should be free to require people to leave for any reason; the restaurant is private property.
This is your position? Just confirming.”
Yes, that is my position as well. It is also my position that there will be consequences to said restaurant owner. And they will be fully justified. Do what you will, but don’t come crying to mama gummint when the blowback goes pear-shaped.
bobby b @ June 26, 2018 at 10:43 pm:
Is homosexuality “hardwired” into Afghans who sodomize boys? Militant feminists?
Was it “hardwired” for Oscar Wilde (who had two children) or the ancient Greeks?
The prevalence of homosexuality varies wildly among cultures and across time within cultures. Many individuals veer from homosexual to heterosexual to bisexual over their lives. For instance, consider the TLA “L.U.G.”: “Lesbian Until Graduation”.
Much of this is anathema to present-day homosexual activists, for whom the fixed nature of homosexuality is an article of faith.
There are some people whose sexual orientations are fixed and unchangeable. But humans are an extremely flexible and “programmable” species. Our “hardwiring” is supplemented and extended by “soft wiring” in our brains.
We in Australia have a show called “Insiders”, and a while back the hostess had an Audience of twins, and was discussing twinhood. One pair were men of different orientations- one man was heterosexual, and his identical twin was homosexual! So you can’t blame genes.
@Nicholas
The plural of anecdote is not data. You might want to read the wikipedia page on this. TL;DR, there is about a 60% correlation between homosexuality in one monozygotic twin male and another (though FWIW, other articles you can find tell you that the causality, such as it is, is epigenetic rather than genetic — but that isn’t all that important), though that number might be a bit high due to selection bias. The remaining tendency relate to other factors.
However, don’t think that that means that 40% aren’t “born that way.” In fact in utero conditions are impactful two, and even two fetuses occupying the same uterus can have quite different conditions especially so if they don’t share a pacenta. And another major factor is early childhood experiences. One can hardly think that it is a “choice” what experiences you have in your pre-pubescent years. There is also evidence that having older brothers increases the likelihood of being gay, which, again is not your choice. No doubt there are also many other factors too — some of which are discussed in the wikipedia article.
I don’t find Bobby b’s argument (why would they chose such a painful way of life?) particularly compelling. People make that sort of choice all the time in matters that are plainly entirely in the realm of choice, ask Thích Quảng Đức. However, I do think that the actual science on this indicates that being gay — for men anyway — is largely due to factors out of the control of the adult.
(FWIW, from what I can see, lesbianism is almost completely different than gay-ness, so I think it is a mistake to put them all under the banner of “gay”. But that is a story for another day.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_and_sexual_orientation
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/06/biological_basis_for_homosexuality_the_fraternal_birth_order_explanation.html