Social Discrimination

I am fascinated over the discussion surrounding Baldwin and Robertson situations.  Most are outraged in some fashion or another but to me, what has happened in both instances is exactly the way the creation and observance of social mores should take place. It is indeed the way a business like Abercrombie and Fitch should be dealt with when they cross the sensibilities of the customer.  This is the first time in a long time that the word ‘discrimination’ has not wound up in a court(although, unfortunately it still could).  It is a rarity in American culture, at least over the last 30 years or so, that the court of public opinion decided an issue.  It is exactly as it should be.

I know that some of you will reject what I am saying out of hand, but please, for the sake of civil discussion, try to understand what I am saying.  Just as pfunky and Max have accused all people who disagree with homosexuality of having an ‘anus fixation’ (which is not true), don’t read this with a ‘southern, white supremacist’ fixation.  It is not the case and if you look objectively at the history of argument with respect to the word ‘discrimination’ and the knockon effects of  the way we see liberty and our pursuit of happiness you will come to understand that what you see as ‘rage’ is much more about concern.  Concern for the path we are taking in law making in response to things some people feel are ‘offensive’.

Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, there has been an undoing battle over the ‘right’ to discriminate.  It is a ‘right’ you know. In anything that looks like a free country, it can’t be anything other than a right.  A good many on the left will immediately think ‘Southern Racists’ but the fact of the matter is that a large number of people attacked the act on constitutional rather than racial grounds… as bad law, not bad intent.    Now while it is completely true that some people in the south wanted slaves back and some wanted a legal division of ‘separate but equal ‘,  a good many saw the segregationist laws of the south as no less insidious as the civil rights act with respect to a person’s right of personal association.  That is, a law that insists that people do something against their will is no more correct than a law that prevents people from doing something that they want to.

The current issues in the news focus directly on our personal right to discriminate.  We discriminate in the method of our religious worship which also encompasses political dogma. We discriminate in the choice of our friends. We differ in our tastes and likes, and yet nothing can be done about this for it is beyond regulation in the absence of a binding grant from us to our form of government…. This is a personal and constitutional right beyond the power of legislation.

Many people, in my opinion, rightfully interpret the 1964 act and subsequent rulings as a very dangerous encroachment on the essence of why the Constitution and its predecessor, the Articles of Confederation, were written in the first place.  The history of discrimination laws presents an ideal case study of extrajudicial constitutional development. Claims of a constitutionally grounded right to discriminate were all but laughed out of court, yet outside the courtroom these same claims resonate in almost all areas of our personal life; the things we do, what we by and what establishments we frequent..  are all a matter of choice decided my personal likes and prejudices…  discriminating tastes.

While we can all agree that government… local, state and federal governments, MUST be blind as to race, sex and religion… that list has expanded to include just about everything under the sun up to  people who THINK they are one sex but are biologically the other and have extended the word public to include any private business giving service to the ‘public’.   This is a dangerous distortion in the use of the word public because the essence of business is private…  private funding, private property and the ideas for the business and its plan in the first place are founded on personal choice and not by the public or public expectation.   The success of the business or lack their of is or should be only the domain of public expectation and not law forcing public expectation.

Yet, no business has the right, any more,  to build a business that rejects a segment of the population based on someone else’s legal list of requirements.  Abercrombie & Fitch is a case where shunning has caused the company to change its product line which previously refused to offer plus size cloths (good) but would be taken to court if they refused to hire the very same people they refused to make products for (bad).  The company should have whatever hiring process it desires… if the public are just as insulted as they are over the product line.. the company would change its hiring practice, but if public accepted the company’s exclusion of certain people, then so be it. It is not a case for the law but one of public opinion.

“To deprive a person of this basic right to pursue his calling … unless he furnishes labor or services for certain individuals for whom he does not desire to work is obviously coercion if not outright punishment. When an individual is either coerced into working for another or punished for failure to
do so, the inescapable conclusion is that such employment amounts to involuntary servitude.”

The problem with using laws to solve social problems is that once you determine it right to create a law ‘for’ something… someone else can create a like law ‘against’.  It is very important that we understand the corrosive nature of this laws regardless of the context in which they are made.  A case in point is the Lester Madox case of the Pickrick restaurant.  No doubt Madox was a racist but that did not change that fact that he was a private business owner who catered to certain people and had every right to pursue that business model… even if it ultimately, in the court of public opinion, left him bankrupt.  The case argued to and lost by, in my opinion, extra-judicial proceedings was grounded in the inherent first amendment right to discriminate and the fact that the 13th amendment was created to promote individual liberty and not equality.  In the end, so convinced of the legal miscarriage of a person’s right to choose and right to association that Maddox closed his restaurant and erected a monument on that very same private property commemorating “the death of private property rights in America”.  

In my opinion this discussion focuses too narrowly on the civil rights movement that tend to over emphasize the exceptionalism of the Jim Crow south and misses the much broader issue that has been argued in all parts of this country over housing, business and indeed personal association which find the public’s naturally inherent right to choose, on the wrong side of the singular issue of breaking the racist south.

Much like the struggle between the federalist and anti-federalist of their time, historians and legal scholars and pundits have given considerable attention to the movement’s transformational impact on constitutional development, yet most attention has focused on achievements of the movement’s protagonists. Not enough focus has been given to the constitutional arguments put forth by those who lost the critical battles of the day.  In ignoring the significance of these arguments we eventually loose our direction and forget the reasons the court got involved in the first place.  In doing so, we start building new law on old and sometimes bad precedent.

As a libertarian at heart, I see the continual march for equity to be most harmful to reasons and purpose for the formation of this great country.  No one will truly be equal to another if for no other reason than the differences in intellect, interest and determination.  Attempting forced equality at the expense of freedom of choice and liberty creates a never ending march to a totalitarian state.  Some people like to differentiate socialist and totalitarian but both stipulate in broad stroke, with force, the conduct of its people and both are headed by chosen elitists who neither live by or are governed by the rules that they make.  Laws must be created with the understanding that they may one day be used to oppress the things you do and think about.  So many laws created today are band-aids for immediate problems what have unintended consequence tomorrow.

Of course there are people who oppose an individual’s right to oppose others or even speak of that opposition.  We see in the aftermath of what Robertson said that Jessie Jackson had to stick his oar in the debate with an utterly stupid statement but one that resonates with a lot of people and creates the kind of animosity between races and groups of people who have genuine differences of opinion.

“These statements uttered by Robertson are more offensive than the bus driver in Montgomery, Alabama, more than 59 years ago,” Jackson said. “At least the bus driver, who ordered Rosa Parks to surrender her seat to a white person, was following state law. Robertson’s statements were uttered freely and openly without cover of the law, within a context of what he seemed to believe was ‘white privilege.’”


White privilege?  Openly without the cover of law?  Some people will hear this and actually believe him.  I guess free speech and therefore the constitution is no longer the law and no longer within the reach of people or at least white people. 


“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person," Robertson told GQ. "Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field.... They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!... Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”

Robertson was speaking as to his reality…  His observations.   Not once did he step outside of his personal experience.  Not once did he say that slavery was good… but leave it to the people who love to stir racial hatred …  leave it to the left to try to stifle anything that they disagree with.  With this kind of warped ‘equality’, it is no wonder that people seem to think we have to change the constitution…  we don’t need to change it, we just need to read and respect it.

The ‘right’ to not be discriminated against doesn’t, and can’t, exist alongside the First Amendment, but progressives always make up rights as they go along. Often, we cooperate when the fabricated right feels and looks innocent… “Hmm, a right to not be discriminated against? Well, that neither exists nor makes any sense at all, but it feels good, so I’m fine with it!” In the next phase, the made-up right is applied in ways that we don’t particularly enjoy, but we’ve lost the ability to oppose it.  Of course, perhaps this is the very reason that people find the constitution out dated...  Provisions like the  first amendment allow people to much leeway in thought and behavour..

Of course now that A&E has backed down to public pressure to reinstate Phil, GLAAD’s panties are well and truly in a twist.  Angry because A&E didn’t bow to their set of ‘moral’ rules, they accuse it of profit over bigotry….  Who, I have to ask is the biggest bigot in this argument, given that it are these types of organizations who try to use boycott as a preferred method of extortion…

As an aside.  Had we, when the civil war was initiated, truly been interested in slavery.. the equality of all citizens, then we would have enforced the basic law rather than trying to contrive new ones.  No state ever had the right to contravene the equality of men and once the word ‘men’ were rightly defined as both men and women of any color, the case should have been settled easily in all of the states.  Creating a law that is an antithesis of a bad law… is a good law? Prejudice has been allowed to fester in this country for far too long.  While color is a unique problem, immigrants from Italy, Poland, Ireland and Germany came to the US and created and lived in their own communities… as time elapsed they began to trade, to marry and to integrate naturally because they were all treated as equals under the law.  Social mores were sorted out between them not by a law forcing everyone to eat Italian approved Schnitzel...or by forcing a Polish shop to hire an Irish person.

Of coarse all I have said above no doubt rings hollow to the statist… to the one who will not be happy until everyone believes and acts the same… and of course all of them scream with abandon… ‘Hail to the Chief’….