Friday 30 October 2015

Second Comment At "Thinking Taiwan" On "Why We Must Push Back"

Worth repeating here, I think. Link to the article.

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If two people want to get married, then that is their business and nobody else's (except perhaps the people officiating). This should never have been a political question or issue to even begin with, and the more this issue rumbles on, the better the opportunity is to get the State out of the business of marriage altogether (and the social engineering which that allows).

J.M.Cole writes...

"It is discrimination, in this case based on an other individual’s sexual orientation. It is the organized denial of a human right to a category of people."

The trouble with this though is that laws against discrimination set a very dangerous precedent. There was a court case a short while back in Northern Ireland about a bakery who refused to bake a cake with Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street under the slogan "Support Gay Marriage". Suppose the tables were turned: what if the bakers had been gay and had been asked by a Muslim customer to bake a cake with "Death for Gays", or "Support Sharia Law" as the slogan - if they had refused, would they then have been found guilty of religious discrimination? It is not difficult to imagine other possibilities.

And that is not the only contradiction.

More important is the right to freedom of association. To be free to associate with whom you wish implies that you are also free to disassociate from whomever you wish. The one makes no sense without the other. Anti-discrimination laws directly and clumsily impinge upon this right. Should a gay nightclub be prohibited from refusing entry to a group of religious anti-gay nutters? Of course they should not be - but they should be permitted to do so, because that nightclub is private property. Private property, free trade and freedom of expression all go hand-in-glove with discrimination and the freedom of association it allows. So why not let the bakers refuse the order? It is their business after all, and they are effectively handing money over to a competitor anyway. Let them (possibly) ruin their own business.

We need discrimination, and when I say "we" that includes homosexuals. We need it when we choose among all the people we interact with, whether colleagues, friends or lovers. Discrimination is the foundation of civil society. It is the basis of boycotts and ostracization, just as it is the basis of affiliation, organization and trade. Civil society is vital and we can't afford to let the politicists have the State start dicking about with it. In many cases, discrimination may be the best protection that minority groups can get.

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