Religious liberty and the Romance of Orthodoxy

I am not really sure you’ve hit the nail on the head with looking at this as a liberalism vs orthodoxy issue. I think your third last paragraph sort of demonstrates this:

“It’s all very well to mess with your poor gay kid’s head in awful, traditional ways, so long as you wrongly believe being gay is always and in every way horrible, miserable, shameful and bad. But once you yourself don’t believe that – because, honestly, everyone knows better today – would it be ethical to raise a (perhaps) gay child while intentionally concealing from them the possibility of living like (oh, say) one of the nice, happy gay people”

In this paragraph you shifted from a scenario where the ethics of homosexuality and its social acceptance were evaluated using liberal philosophy (or conversely, using orthodox religious theology) , to an evaluation of what the ethical approach is using our current knowledge and experience

The latter is quite modified from your early approach , since it is more based on what the right thing to do is if you weigh up all the evidence.

Of course to get this evidence you would need a liberal approach, unless you decided to run lengthy confined social experiments instead (which is not very ethical)

But — as I was just mentioning in the other thread — other matters where liberalism has applied — like in emitting lots of greenhouse gasses from burning fossil fuels in order to fly to see bird conservation efforts in far away South America instead of local ones — may just as easily turn out to have bad consequences. In relation to gay people liberal approaches have proved good, but for emiting ghg liberal approaches have proved quite bad.

So — as your last paragraph shows — your judgement depends on evidence of benefits and harms accruing to actions, rather than resting on liberal or orthodox attitudes to actions per se

[No longer lurking, silently, silently … ]

Besides the issue of minor children, there will be problems at the margins, where the orthodox community semi-overlaps the public sphere. Cases will predictably arise in which adults who have not consented to be part of this orthodoxy find themselves burdened by the practices of the orthodox.

Yup.

The NYTimes has a piece about this today. specifically about Haredi (ultra-orthodox Jewish) men holding up airline flights when they find that they are seated next to women other than their wives. Imagine if one felt a religious commandment not to be adjacent to gays, Blacks or Jews. But a woman…

From the article:

But multiple travelers, scholars and the airlines themselves say the phenomenon is real. The number of episodes appears to be increasing as ultra-Orthodox communities grow in number and confidence, but also as other passengers, for reasons of comfort as well as politics, push back.

“It’s very common,” said Rabbi Yehudah Mirsky, an associate professor of Judaic studies at Brandeis University. “Multiculturalism creates a moral language where a group can say, ‘You have to respect my values.’”

Anat Hoffman, the executive director of the Israel Religious Action Center, which has started a campaign urging women not to give up their seats, said, “I have 100 stories.”

I meant to add that one obvious solution to the situation for Haredi men is to buy 2 tickets, select adjacent seats on the airplane, a middle and either window or aisle, and leave the middle seat vacant. This would permit them to follow the injunctions of their religion and not inconvenience others.

“I meant to add that one obvious solution to the situation”

Another one is that since flying emits a great deal of dangerous ghg it can be quickly phased out, so then Haredi men will just have this problem on trains

bianca steele,

“Not sure where you got the idea that David was expressing the US view? ”

I though he was explaining American liberalism for non-Americans. In Australia our Liberal party is our right wing party so liberalism is a bit different here.

He said : “Just a couple of quick points before this discussion disappears irrevocably into the darker and more inaccessible reaches of American politics, where few non-Americans can follow. The essence of the liberal approach to religious belief is that everyone is entitled to believe that their religion is true in the privacy of their own minds…”

“No one has suggested that the right to political speech and protest is protected as freedom of religion”

Yes but he said liberalism thinks government laws are above any other moral injunctions , religious, conscience etc. and these latter are just for in the privacy of one’s own mind. So religious people protesting against the governments refugee laws would be orthodox not liberal (which holds government laws higher)?

Kind of interesting to think about how Abraham and Isaac would play out in the contemporary US. (ISTR Alice Waters devoted a fair amount of “The Drama of the Gifted Child” to that story, is that right? It’s been a long time.)

Pretty sure Flannery O’Connor has a story that’s a retelling of Abraham and Isaac, have forgotten the details however.

Dreher: “Small-o orthodox Christians had better grasp that the religious liberties of Jews and Muslims are our own religious liberties, and make friendships and tactical alliances across these boundaries.”

But this is exactly what they can’t do. They can’t do this because they are invested, culturally and politically, in using the power of the state to suppress other religions in the public square and boost Christianity. I haven’t seen a principled religious-freedom argument from the right in some time: it always comes down to “America is a Christian country” or something like that. They should not have allied themselves with religious and racial bigots.

At a more general level, a lot of this has to do with religious conservatives discovering once again that capitalism is no friend to a small-c conservative cultural order. Once again, their political alliances have been bad.

John Holbo: “It’s all very well to mess with your poor gay kid’s head in awful, traditional ways, so long as you wrongly believe being gay is always and in every way horrible, miserable, shameful and bad. But once you yourself don’t believe that – because, honestly, everyone knows better today – would it be ethical to raise a (perhaps) gay child while intentionally concealing from them the possibility of living like (oh, say) one of the nice, happy gay people I’m reasonably sure Rod Dreher must know?”

Have you read _The Nurture Assumption_? I have, and it’s not a religious book, not is it a manual on how to program your child. It goes through a lot of research (probably somewhat dated now) to argue for something that seems fairly believable: that a good deal of childrens’ core personality attributes and culture are worked out by interactions within their peer group, and that their parents don’t have as much to do with it as parents usually think. It really has little to say about intentional concealment of the existence of something or other, and more about the importance of who your kids actually interact with day to day. Which is something that people have pretty much been allowed to control, in various ways, and it would be quite a change to say philosophically that they can’t.

John,

Sorry for the length of the comment…

I think you’re on to something really important here–something that, should Rod take the time to read through and think about what you say, I suspect he’d really have to take the time to think about a respond to. The key is the way in which you focus in on a concept of religious liberty which “functions as a check or curb on individual liberty,” and specifically how the liberty to organize you life (and, presumably, the lives of one’s children and the lives that one and one’s co-religionists collectively articulate within their group) around “orthodoxy” becomes a kind of countervailing pressure upon the expansions of heterodox, individual life choices. In other words, this is all about pluralism, and how it is to be conceived in a free society. Paging Jacob T. Levy!

As a religious believer myself, I think that the wrinkle you identify here is perhaps deeper than you allow. Chesterton and Rod (we’re friends, so I feel comfortable calling him that) aren’t entirely engaging in a slight-of-hand move, because serious traditionalists (at least within the Christian tradition) really do reject the idea of autonomous selves. You have to begin with the either teleologically or divinely-ordered community, because that’s actually all there is; atomism, the individual really making choices on the basis of their own perception of themselves and the world around them, isn’t just unwise in terms of respecting the unstated moral or civic requirements of a free and just society, but actually impossible. And so, fundamentally, some orthodoxies are more “real,” they better reflect what Charles Taylor once called in an argument about Foucault the “bend” of reality. Obviously this brings up the place of Kennedy’s “mystery of human life” as you correctly note; it’s just that those who are pursuing the liberty-of-orthodoxy for themselves, their families, and their communities may well make the claim that they’re operating in what C.S. Lewis called “enemy-occupied territory,” having to make use of the language and legal structures of individual choice in order to carve a space for themselves in the midst of pluralism when they actually don’t see themselves as simply constructing a multicultural space at all: because their space is true.

This is why I suspect my friend Michael Austin caught something important when he wrote (in a Mormon context) that the argument about religious liberty is really, fundamentally, an argument about religious “comfort.” For a great many historical and cultural reasons, serious traditionalists like Rod could take comfort from the fact that, even though the truth that they knew God was calling them (and everyone) to had no privileged place, its basic presumptions–most especially dealing with sexual morality and marriage, which may seem like an odd focus, but then again really does genuinely impact upon the most intimate and individual level of choice–were nonetheless reflected in legal and social norms. So operating as a traditionalist group, teaching one’s kids, etc., in a secular society of choice was nonetheless “comfortable” (especially if you lived in Utah or Indiana or Arkansas). But now that level of comfort–and all the financial an educational privileges which traditionalists and their conservative sympathizers have been able to build into tax law and school curricula, etc., along the way–may really, finally, be taken away. For someone who sees this in light of the ongoing negotiation between individual and group/associational rights and choices (and as you rightly say, I think, from that perspective there “is pretty obviously no fix for this problem”), this is the sort of ongoing democratic argument which rights of exit and Child Protection Services and all the rest are part of. But for someone like Rod or Chesterton, it’s a wrong or false ideology finally completing its conquest; it is, as Damon Linker suggested, something which they (and deeply committed pluralists like him) see as the secularizing triumph of a new church or ideology, the church of “anti-discrimination.” Because, after all, what is a confessional and believing group, except a group which insists on being able to discriminate in regards to its own boundaries? Take away the legal right to respond to God’s mandate that believers self-identify, gather together in His name, and act accordingly, and what have you got left? French laïcité, I guess–and Rod’s proposal that now discomforted traditionalists get out, go Benedictine, and withdraw to form their own oppositional communities, with their own distinct economies and ways of life. It’s worked for the Amish and their parallel society for a couple of centuries; why not them?

“Alice Waters” s/b Alice Miller of course, how embarrassing.

I believe Alice Waters wrote that book about how every home environment is just as good as every other home environment for raising children–“Chez Pangloss”.

Messed up the italics there, sorry.

crossed with @23, possibly while typing and deleting a sentence that contaimed the words “as I hope Russell Fox would agree”

@23

this is about a group of believers that can, in the context of their understanding of scripture and tradition, comfortably and successfully shape the society around them

Dreher’s piece is filled with examples, though, if extending “the society around them” to a ridiculous extent. His friend complains about other people’s (on the East Coast) understanding of “religion” being wrong. If he changed that to their understanding of their own religion being wrong because it was unlike his, it would be easy to see where the problem was. He takes a situation where the other guy disagrees and switches it to a situation where the other guy is stupid. And not surprisingly we ended up with a situation where real issues matter lest than the HORRIFYING fact that people have different opinions.

Is there any such thing as a general attachment to religious freedom in principle by people who are themselves deeply religious? Superficially at least it seems a contradiction in terms, since surely you would prefer that everyone shared your religion. Isn’t it more an essentially liberal idea, a skeptical attitude that says that final truths are unknowable and that no faith has a monopoly of wisdom? But that’s a startlingly modern view – even half a century ago it would have been unacceptable to most believers in advanced western countries. But if you “know” your faith is true, what then? Demanding the freedom to practice it, whilst refusing that freedom to others, is actually quite logical.

Dreher asks, “Why can’t Republicans articulate this?”

The short answer is, “Because they will not celebrate Zen Buddhism, nor moderate Islam, nor psychedelic experience, nor MDMA cessation of soldiers’ PTSD.”

I think the argument breaks out beyond usual labels, because both sides have oppositions within them. There are 1. religionists who believe that theirs is the only true religion, and there are 2. religionists who believe that their religion is only one of many metaphors for spiritual change.

On the secular side, there are 3. secularists who think the idea of spiritual change is an hallucination, and there are 4. secularists who think that the change is real even if its provenance is misapprehended and that it may occur via different avenues.

So that’s FOUR orthodoxies whose liberty is to be defended! And thus we are still stuck in the early modern period. But I think the political theory of what’s orthodox, and what is not, may soon be transcended in all four cases.

To approach it from the other end: Dreher’s pseudonymous Professor Kingsfield has got it precisely wrong. Religious liberty is about to be reasserted and promoted, big-time. That is because traditional religious belief and scientific secularism are BOTH about to dissolve.

Let’s start from a fact which only some people, though it is an increasing number, have experienced. There is an event in meditation consciousness which is real: “ego death –> higher consciousness” is a real event. Most religionists and scientists have not experienced it, however, because it takes a lot of meditation. And without experiencing it, they do not quite understand it, because the only thing they can know is an intellectual framework, but it is not an intellectual framework.

Scientists are easier to dismiss from the conversation, so far. Scientists are unaware, or think that it is mere hallucination, so science has rarely tried to study it, and gotten it wrong.

Religionists are a more difficult bunch, because they think they know what they are talking about. They believe in various frameworks which are based upon it, but they still don’t understand it. Christians do not understand that the story of Christ is a metaphor for a real event in consciousness, that “belief” is a structural prerequisite for the personal self-sacrifice, and that most of their traditional teaching has actually led them away from personal knowledge of the real event. Islamists, Vedantists, you name it, all show similar misunderstandings based in their own intellectual frameworks, their theologies.

This is all about to start changing, and more rapidly than you may think.

What is going to change this? The combination of the things bracketed here: [MRI brain studies of meditation sessions in which the highest state of religious consciousness is self-reporte;, including psychedelic sessions, where after 6-8 sessions it is quite commonly reported, thus making it more tractable to experimental study] + [a comparative analysis of practical manuals in old religious mysticism].

This is going to lead to a very different, new orthodoxy, something along these lines: [a non-materialist metaphysics of incompleteness and the non-algorithmic parts of the mind] + [a cessation of the ideologies of self-interest in economics and of methodological individualism in the social science of the future].

Among other things, the coming era is going to accept homosexuality. People won’t worry about homosexuals, because the old religious injunctions came out of the requirement to stop sexual desire as one of the many desires which must cease for the self-sacrifice needed in meditation for ego-death before higher consciousness. In other words,this was never functionally about sexual orientation, it is always functionally about “lust” — but the old religions still needed to justify sex for propagation of the species, and so restricted it to heterosexual marriage.

The coming era will also have reduced occurrences of abortion. Abortion rates will fall to medically-necessary levels, largely because the gain in conscious control of impulses will reduce unwanted pregnancy and rape.

Bianca.

Dreher’s piece is filled with examples, though, if extending “the society around them” to a ridiculous extent.

I think “ridiculous” is on the harsh side, but your point holds. Look, if you are a believer in traditionalist Christian orthodoxy in 20th-century America, you actually really could operate in the wider society, quite successfully–climbing the corporate ladder, government appointments, academic publishing success, etc.–without being fundamentally compromised or discomforted in your desire to pass along your orthodoxy to your kids. The public schools were (mostly) on your side–yes, the school prayer and civil rights things were major issues for a few of these groups for a while, but they could be finessed–and the mass media didn’t especially offend you, etc. Lose that, and where do you find yourself?

ZM,

Well land was not so expensive when the Amish acquired large tracts of land, and also farm products sold at a better price. Your friends group could farm organically to benefit the environment and get higher prices. But the Amish are beset by problems at the moment since many of them like various elements of modern technology, and also there are too many Amish for the amount of land they have — so some Amish have to get jobs out in the wider community and then they can feel compromised having to use computers etc.

Excellent points. In a lot of ways, getting serious about operating as a parallel society within the context of a (mostly) tolerant secular runs depends on all sorts of socio-economic realities, land-use issues, etc. This is why you sometimes see this really odd–and I think, frankly, kind of cool–anti-globalist and agrarian attitude amongst a certain set of otherwise perfectly modern religious conservatives; completely aside from however they choose to interpret scripture, I suspect a lot of them kind of know, on some level, that if they really want to exercise the Benedictine option they’re going to have to carve out a farming-based social and economic space for themselves, and not just a legal one.

David, Jews have never thought that everyone should be Jewish. Nor would a Roman demand that everyone sacrifice to the Roman gods: rather he would demand they honor whatever gods they had around, while he sacrifices to his.

I don’t see how group rights enter into this. Dreher isn’t arguing that we should enforce religious law upon those who are born into a particular religion. Rather he’s arguing that we all should have the right to associate with those who share our values, and avoid impositions on the values of others. He would argue you have the right to be gay, but not to be a gay Mormon: they can kick you out of their party, and thus preserve orthodoxy.

So does Hobo’s objection make sense? Can we have religious liberty without the right to form communities of those with similar beliefs?

Russell,

I did misread your comment regarding the timeframe involved. But I don’t know what Rod Dreher means when he says we should go back to a presumption that what he calls serious or believing Christians would succeed in the business world, the law, and so on. Does belief have public meaning for him or does it not? If it does, he’s being coy about which beliefs in particular the liberals are supposedly unfairly excluding from their campuses and so on.

Is there any such thing as a general attachment to religious freedom in principle by people who are themselves deeply religious? Superficially at least it seems a contradiction in terms, since surely you would prefer that everyone shared your religion.

Only if you follow a proselytizing religion.

This is a perfect minor example of the irreconcilable moral foundations problem, aka God Is Not One. One of the great triumphs of a liberal society is that it provides (or, at least, seeks to provide) a safe space for meta-debate on the nature of a liberal society. What orthodoxy loses by liberalism, orthodoxies gain.

Because, after all, what is a confessional and believing group, except a group which insists on being able to discriminate in regards to its own boundaries? Take away the legal right to respond to God’s mandate that believers self-identify, gather together in His name, and act accordingly, and what have you got left?

Fortunately, those rights are almost totally secure for the foreseeable future. Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. EEOC upheld 9-0 the right of believers to discriminate arbitrarily with regard to their selection of ministers. It’s also difficult to imagine that churches wouldn’t have the right to discriminate in who they accept as members.

I understand why some believers may not think that goes far enough. It is easier to maintain a set of values when those values are upheld by your surrounding community–whether by law, by market forces, or by social norms.

But there is something of a contradiction in demanding that this be permitted on the basis of religious freedom. If someone’s religious view is dependent on the presence of public discrimination to uphold it, that logically implies that competing religious views are dependent on the absence of that discrimination to uphold their contrary views. As soon as believers start interacting with other kinds of believers, the religious freedom claims become zero-sum–any expansion in my religious freedom to discriminate is a loss in your religious freedom from discrimination.

This contradiction can be avoided if one makes the argument on purely individualist grounds–you have the right to trade and associate with whom you wish, etc.

Moderation, huh?

It is a mystery to me how such a grotesque, reality-challenged and logically inconsistent hack piece (starting from the premise of an obviously invented law school professor who doesn’t dare speak up in favor of religious liberty) deserves any answer at all, and to the extent that an undeserved answer is thought to be in order, why that answer should be longer than a paragraph. I know you don’t like to hear this John but seriously why are you doing this?

ZM 5: The relevant question to ask would be what conservative self-styled defenders of religious liberty (for example, Indiana Republicans) would have to say about liberals breaking the law to defend refugees on religious/conscientious grounds. If you think you’ll find any takers, any right-wingers saying – yeah, that is exactly what people should have the right to do if they are compelled to by their religious convictions – you must be seriously deluded.

Watson Ladd 04.09.15 at 2:08 pm

“David, Jews have never thought that everyone should be Jewish. Nor would a Roman demand that everyone sacrifice to the Roman gods: rather he would demand they honor whatever gods they had around, while he sacrifices to his.”

And a good thing it was. Could you imagine if (just as an impossible hypothetical) some Roman authorities messed with the Jew’s religion in Israel?

Why, there could be hubbub! A kerfuffle?

(of course, not a war – that’s crazy talk!).

As soon as believers start interacting with other kinds of believers, the religious freedom claims become zero-sum–any expansion in my religious freedom to discriminate is a loss in your religious freedom from discrimination.

This. The obvious analogy with monopolies and competitive markets in the mundane sphere is somewhat instructive: a monopoly is both much more likely to abuse, and (because of regulatory capture) much harder to check when abusive, than any one competitor among many. Surely Americans, at least, have noticed that our heaven-sent blessings of liberty fall unevenly with a predictable distribution.

I had started out thinking that you wanted to clarify and discuss the issues, from an academic philosophy point of view. But then you throw bits in like this

“The issue here is structurally similar to the NEA ‘piss christ’ and Robert Maplethorpe controversies of yore. Should ordinary citizens, scandalized by this stuff, be forced to pay for it via taxes (or even just tax exemptions for organizations than sponsor it)?”

It’s really not structurally equivalent. There is nothing structurally equivalent about an objection to funding of art that is aesthetically displeasing to you and an objection to funding for an organization that teaches that you (as, for example, a gay person) are despicable and your way of life should be outlawed (or even worse, that teaches that you should die).

There are more bits like this, where you seem to try to draw parallels to stuff liberals claim or support, as if to say “I am taking on this side now, but the other side has just as many wrong-headed folks”.

Do the religious liberty folks want to extend the rights they seek to Wiggans, satanists, and of course Muslims? Does anyone want to make a bet as to whether Dreher and Kingsfield were supportive of the Muslim community center in downtown NY a year or so ago? Why do you insist on taking them at face value and making complex philosophical arguments about their positions when there is a lot of evidence they’re simply reactionaries that want to preserve existing social hierarchies, as Corey Robin has discussed at length?

I understand the need to find intellectual opponents among the Right, but please explain, if you feel so inclined, how this is different from the effort of various serious pundits to find a serious Republican on macro-economic matters, and anointing whoever can spell his name as a serious thinker (e.g. Paul Ryan) regardless of their actually unserious or regressive positions.

Also, this:

“It’s all very well to mess with your poor gay kid’s head in awful, traditional ways, so long as you wrongly believe being gay is always and in every way horrible, miserable, shameful and bad.”

It’s legal, but from a philosophical standpoint “all very well”? According to which theory? BTW, even if you don’t believe it. it’s still legal.

I want to hoist a small flag here about terminology. The Disciples of Christ, the Friends General Conference, and other groups of Christians who see their duty to God including a very different sort of legal and social order aren’t heterodox. It is not more authentically Christian to feel Dreher’s kind of hate and fear than the kind of generosity and willingness to coexist shown by Heath Rada, Moderator of the Presbyterian Church (US).

I have no particular reason to doubt Dreher’s sincerely felt passions. But I also see no reason to grant him any authority when it comes to establishing how Christian his vision is and how un-Christian alternative experiences are.

Once upon a time, everyone (at least everyone who was everyone) assumed that all responsible people belonged to a major religious sect (who this included might change, Jews or not, Muslims or not?, at what point in the evolution of Christendom to stop allowing new entrants?). (If this is the case, being able to exclude people becomes a problem, incidentally.) This sounds nice and all kumbayaa. Once upon a time, everybody recognized that this common religion was basically an Enlightenment, liberal vision of a minimal shared core morality. But taken in the abstract, it could mean anything. It could mean that all “real” religions keep women down in a certain way. It could mean that all “real” religions exclude some specified group (Jews, gays, non-whites, etc.). It could mean that every religion must exclude somebody, whomever you will, and everybody who’s not discriminated against must be allowed to participate in exclusion. So it’s not enough of a distinction to say “minimally shared core morality,” though it seems like it should be.

Bloix @ 52 is of course correct. See e.g. Pliny’s letter to Trajan, seeking advice during Pliny’s term as a provincial governor:

An anonymous document was published containing the names of many persons. Those who denied that they were or had been Christians, when they invoked the gods in words dictated by me, offered prayer with incense and wine to your image, which I had ordered to be brought for this purpose together with statues of the gods, and moreover cursed Christ–none of which those who are really Christians, it is said, can be forced to do–these I thought should be discharged. Others named by the informer declared that they were Christians, but then denied it, asserting that they had been but had ceased to be, some three years before, others many years, some as much as twenty-five years. They all worshipped your image and the statues of the gods, and cursed Christ.

Yet this is problematic. Dreher would, I think, have to agree with what I’ll call the Abraham Principle. If someone is a credible threat to the health and safety of his child – even if he believes God commands it! – Child Protective Services should step in. There’s no other way to run the railroad. Dreher worries the state will seriously abuse its privilege of defining ‘serious abuse’, but he wouldn’t deny that this privilege is also an obligation.

But once this camel’s nose is in the tent, aren’t all debates about the principle of the matter over? Clearly, according to the Bible, Abraham was right to sacrifice Isaac, up until the moment the angel told him to stop. If Dreher and others aren’t willing to support their definition of acceptance of orthodoxy as the truly liberal model for behavior, if they don’t support faith healers denying life-saving medical treatment to their children, then they’ve already conceded that the rights of the orthodox have limits, and we’re only left with cases where the facts of the matter, rather than the underlying principle, is in doubt.

I don’t see that Dreher would agree with the Abraham Principle. I don’t give him a lot of attention, but he certainly seems to be working himself in the direction of allowing nothing at all to interfere with passionately felt religious conviction as long as he approves of it.

58: I think the Maccabees were an exception to the rule, but that is a good point.

As usual this is about balancing. The problem being that both sides want to cram stuff down the other side’s throat.

This comes down to accommodations. It is interesting that John quotes the ‘common carrier’ idea but doesn’t seem to have any idea what it is. It turns out that the common carrier idea is actually great for balancing religious freedom against community need. For those things where the government provides monopoly or semi-monopoly regulation (taxis and trains in the most classic examples), they have to be open to all people willing to pay. For certain other things considered crucial to life (emergency rooms, hotels for shelter, restaurants for food) they also have to be generally open. For other things, religious people can do things in line with their religion that might inconvenience you–like forcing you to find another person to decorate your wedding.

Really that doesn’t seem so ridiculous to me. And I’m gay, and frankly happy not to have a fundie crazy like my father arrange flowers at my wedding. And if he wants to tell me that he wouldn’t do it, I see know reason why that should be illegal.

Now I fully understand that figuring out which ones are ok and which ones aren’t is a project, but the one you seem to want to default to [religious people should eat it] doesn’t seem any more ‘multicultural’ than [non-religious people should eat it].

(Slight aside–‘the religious people can have beliefs in their own mind but shouldn’t be allowed to use them in the political sphere’ concept talked about in the first few comments is a bad principle. Religious people get to use moral principles in their politics just like you do. The grounds for their moral principles are mysterious, just like yours.)

“but he certainly seems to be working himself in the direction of allowing nothing at all to interfere with passionately felt religious conviction as long as he approves of it.”

Bingo. Dreher has long been a proud member of the “freedom for me but not for thee” party.

“My point in my usual overly circuitous and pedantic way was that historically religion was considered a matter of state and that the idea of leaving it to personal conscience is a modern one with rare exceptions.”

True! But don’t most citizens in Western Democracies now agree that was a bad thing?

bianca steele : “I really don’t understand the nature of the fundamentalist-Catholic rapprochement of the last decades.”

Me neither.
I imagine that here in the states it has something to do with the broader assimilation process of the Polish, Irish, and the Italians – who iirc all had a major wave into the US around the same time after the Civil War but before WWI laying the groundwork for this sort of thing. No idea how the process was initiated tho.

“Good folks such as Holbo badly want there to be ideologically-opposed interlocutors of intelligence and good faith, and for some reason, the despicable hack Dreher is one of the people that the good folks project that desire upon.”

I say things like this for the last 20 John Holbo threads, and everyone says that I shouldn’t tell a poster what to post. And on the first thread where I don’t say it everyone else says it. Mission Accomplished!

Needless to say, the number of people who actually go Benedictine is going to be similar to the number who actually go Galt. Functionally, they are very similar — they are imagined retreats for a dominant class that is perceived to be losing its dominance. But since this is a relative loss of dominance rather than an absolute one, no one is really going to be motivated to follow through.

I say things like this for the last 20 John Holbo threads, and everyone says that I shouldn’t tell a poster what to post.

You just don’t realize what a pit bull you are, Rich. But you’re getting sweeter all the time.

:^)

“I say things like this for the last 20 John Holbo threads, and everyone says that I shouldn’t tell a poster what to post. And on the first thread where I don’t say it everyone else says it.”

It’s my suave aftershave, Rich. I’ll send you a bottle.

(But really, I’m not telling Holbo what to post or whom to respect. I’m just finding it a bit risible, like when Kevin Drum goes “hey, Megan McArdle said something interesting ….”)

He had me at Social Justice Warriors.

I think it was less than a year ago that I first encountered that term and now it seems to be everywhere in the reactionary-o-sphere. Am I just noticing it more? Or did they all hold a meeting some time in 2014 and endorse a resolution that wastes of skin would switch from feminazis to SJWs when they’re signaling “ignore me”?

“Or did they all hold a meeting some time in 2014 and endorse a resolution that wastes of skin would switch from feminazis to SJWs when they’re signaling “ignore me”?”

Definitely this. My interactions with reactionaries online has lead me to believe that SJWs are anyone who cares about anything.

It is interesting to see the contempt in which “liberals” hold anyone who disagrees with them.

Mainstream Christians believe in an omnipotent, omniscient, infinitely loving God, whose Providence rules all things and without whose notice not a sparrow falls to the ground. Why would anyone who believed this be so damn exercised about stamping out sin and heterodoxy? Why not pray harder and persecute less? Methinks Dreher — like Neuhaus, and John Paul II — protests far too much and trusts God far too little. Do they really believe — or even understand — their own theology?

When I was in a Catholic religious order, we were told, when assigned to proselytize: “Pray as if everything depends on God; act as if everything depends on you.” This slogan was very effective at first in getting me to act. But then I reflected that there’s no “as if” about it — everything does depend on God. If he was infinitely powerful, knowing, and loving, then what need of my actions or even my prayers?

I still don’t get it. How is it possible, logically or psychologically, to trust at once so much and so little in God? I can only endorse Anderson’s comment above that, if there’s an afterlife, Dreher (and Neuhaus and John Paul II) are going to be very unpleasantly surprised.

” I can only endorse Anderson’s comment above that, if there’s an afterlife, Dreher (and Neuhaus and John Paul II)”

Frankly any afterlife that involves hanging around with those 3 killjoys for eternity sounds too awful to contemplate…

Dorothy Parker, “Partial Comfort”:

Whose love is given over-well
Shall look on Helen’s face in hell,
Whilst they whose love is thin and wise
May view John Knox in paradise.

“But no one in the U.S. really believes that we could be at the losing end of a war on our soil.”

Pre-nukes, you might have been right about that.

Touché. Post-nukes, all ends of a war can be losing ends.

George,

Mainstream Christians believe in an omnipotent, omniscient, infinitely loving God, whose Providence rules all things and without whose notice not a sparrow falls to the ground. Why would anyone who believed this be so damn exercised about stamping out sin and heterodoxy? Why not pray harder and persecute less? Methinks Dreher — like Neuhaus, and John Paul II — protests far too much and trusts God far too little. Do they really believe — or even understand — their own theology?

Well said. This is the question which Christians like myself, and many others (some of whom have shown up on this thread), regularly ask to Dreher, etc.: is it really so difficult to grasp that one’s understanding of the Teleological Verities of Existence are, ultimately, just the latest good-faith, all-too-human effort to grasp The Whole Big Story? Ross Douthat did this “interview” with himself to attempt to present to conservative-and-worried-about-threats-to-religious-liberty position; when he honestly acknowledged that there are many millions of committed, even pious, Christians and readers of the Bible who think that argument about keeping oneself separate from the gay taint just doesn’t wash, he responded by stating simply that, well yeah, but “I just think their views ultimately point in a post-biblical, post-Christian direction.” For the life of me, I don’t quite see how someone who thinks (as I do, and as I presume he does too) that Jesus changed everything can imagine that social norms and legal rules about respect and association could move anything into a “post-Christian” state. I mean, honestly, I actually kind of like the idea of a robust civic religion, but I don’t for a moment think God needs the National Day of Prayer. He sure doesn’t need this thing called marriage to be reserved for straights alone either. (I should note, for honesty’s sake, that I used to believe as he does, and I still respect that arguments he and others like him use. But they don’t persuade me anymore.)

I believe this is a connected phenomenon:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/10/us/aboard-flights-conflicts-over-seat-assignments-and-religion.html?_r=0

How much should the rest of us accommodate their bigoted/sexist/homophobic believes just because they claim they are religious in origin? My default position is not at all. You don’t want to sit next to a woman on a flight? Buy two tickets or stay home. You don’t want to make a cake for a gay wedding? Don’t become a baker.

@81 geo
“How is it possible, logically or psychologically, to trust at once so much and so little in God? ”

No doubt somewhere in your religious education you’ve run across these two thoughts 1) Do not put your lord God to the test and 2) God has given you the light and it is through that gift that it is spread.

Somewhere in those two phrases is how one can simultaneously trust in God and also take responsibility for putting his words into action.

I don’t doubt that much evil has been practiced in reliance on these ideas – but I also don’t doubt that much good has as well – tis why its called faith.

P.S. not really interested in a broader debate on this bit of chatecism, geo asked what I viewed as a quite legitimate question and I felt obliged to supply the bits of “orthodoxy” which I’m sure he is familliar with but perhaps failed to recall.

Excellent post and comments, as usual at CT, but I think Mr. Holbo may be overthinking things a bit when it comes to analyzing Rod Dreher’s ponderous whingings about “religious liberty”. I read his “Prof. Kingsfield” piece all the way through, and the main takeaway I got was an all-pervasive sense of self-pity, purse-mouthed moralism, and (literally) holier-than-thou self-martyrdom; based on some perceived (and mainly imaginary, IMO) attack on “orthodoxy” by Sinister Forces in the greater society . Which “orthodoxy” Dreher seems to define almost exclusively in terms of its parameters of discrimination, and “liberty” the extent to which that discrimination is legally sheltered. Despite the chronic use of religious tropes to bolster his case, Dreher’s overwrought articles (and the “Kingsfield” one was actually, I thought the best-reasoned of them) all seem to boil down to “Waaaah! Mean bigoted liberals (who are the REAL Fascists) won’t let me discriminate in public, even though God says to! Waaaah!!” Despite the clerical garb, they read to me way more as political arguments than religious or cultural ones: and political arguments from a basically authoritarian/conformist mindset at that.

Time to ask God’s opinion:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/04/06/1375398/-Cartoon-God-speaks

I’ll return to the OP:

“But here’s the short version of where this is going. It’s all very well to mess with your poor gay kid’s head in awful, traditional ways, so long as you wrongly believe being gay is always and in every way horrible, miserable, shameful and bad. But once you yourself don’t believe that – because, honestly, everyone knows better today – would it be ethical to raise a (perhaps) gay child while intentionally concealing from them the possibility of living like (oh, say) one of the nice, happy gay people I’m reasonably sure Rod Dreher must know?”

There’s all sorts of things wrong with this short version of where this is going.

1. It prioritizes sincerity. *Why* is it OK to mess with your kid’s head as long as you sincerely believe that you’re doing the right thing? Isn’t the actual damage what’s important? My concern about the example of the child being raised in this way is not with the parent’s sincerity, and I don’t really understand why anyone should be concerned with this.

2. Do people really all, honestly, know better today? I’d say that they don’t. Or this really wouldn’t be much of a controversy. I think this is a case of assuming that everyone thinks as you do.

3. “Concealing the possibility” is such a weird potential ethical violation. And its so difficult to actually accomplish all the way through adulthood, as opposed to the commonplace of instilling cultural values into a child that they find it very difficult to escape in adulthood.

I feel like I should follow up my own comment @ 90

I read Dreher looking into the near-future, at the possibility of being relegated to a trivial subculture — taking “the Benedict Option” — amidst “narrative collapse” in our culture. It is a search for meaning, by a darkly unimaginative fellow.

Liberals are people, who, in the light of day, step behind Rawls’ curtain, and think its a good time to start playing SimCity. Make some rules, build some roads, zone for the future, dedicate a convenient park. Dreher is someone, who steps behind the Veil of Ignorance — like he needs a veil! — in the deepest dark of night, and amidst the shadows imagines that he is staring into the moral abyss. If there’s no god ordering the moral universe, what is to constrain me (or other people — keep in mind we’re behind the veil) from acting like amoral monsters!? The impulsive chaos of the faithless soul alone with itself looms threatening, like the boogeyman under the bed. And, in the shadowy dimness, shared beliefs — shared in the group — provide a common narrative, a common ritual practice, that erects (or acknowledges, if you please) the moral order that constrains other people and honors my own self-restraint in the service of moral convention. Others are constrained by the community’s common acceptance of ritual, convention and taboo, while I am confirmed by my group membership in my own goodness and honor. Whatever my personal shortcomings or quirks, I am not-other, not amoral.

JH: “Not if you don’t intend to harm the child by raising it in that way, which is the case we are considering.”

But you and the putative sincere traditionalist have different definitions of harm. And the definition of harm that has to matter to a secular state is actual harm, not the harm that supposedly comes from not following religious rules.

JH: “But the public political discourse of the right has shifted very significantly. Think about how Mike Pence felt obliged to preface his defense of RFRA with ‘of course it would be wrong to discriminate against gay people …’ Incoherent, but that’s a significant step forward from where politicians were just 20 years ago.”

That’s nonsense, I think. Liberals have changed the politics on the ground through a lot of work, forcing conservatives to lie about what they believe in order to appear respectable. When the conservatives then lie, they haven’t changed their positions, and they don’t know better. They’re just lying.

Well, unless you have developed telepathic powers, we can’t know which it is. So you prefer to believe that they are incoherent confabulators — and then, for inexplicable reasons, you treat their incoherent confabulations as if they are logical arguments that mean something — and I prefer to think that they are coherent deceivers, with traditional positions that are actually traditional and not created 20 years ago.

The deceit on their part doesn’t mean that we can ignore their rights, though. From my point of view, they’ve been lying thugs and bullies for all of American history. But a whole lot of politics is how you get along with lying thugs and bullies, because they are always there.

“But she is portrayed as being misled rather than as deliberately trying to harm”

It doesn’t matter. Some people think that smoking isn’t harmful. If they teach their kids to smoke, it wouldn’t matter whether they are misled or whether they believe that their kids are happier than way: their kids are being harmed. Their different beliefs about what is harmful are objectively false, in the same way that religious beliefs about upbringing are false in terms of things that we can measure, like suicide rates.

Rich Puchalsky,

that is true – but how we treat people is often in accordance not just with what they do but their intentions. The mother in the book is very difficult for Michael Tolliver but he doesn’t treat her as if she is deliberately trying to inflict harm on him. He writes he the letter because she is helping an anti-gay organisation and he wants to try to stop her inflicting harm on others.

It is important to note that John’s hypothetical about doctors is entirely non-hypothetical.

The hard problem for orthodox prejudices is that the consensus is turning against them. It used to be universally agreed that blacks and women were inferior and gays were mentally diseased, but such traditional beliefs are not only no longer widely held, they’re not even considered respectable.

This is a bit of a problem for those who venerate their age-old doctrine: not only does it no longer have the force of law, but they’re ridiculed by their fellow citizens for clinging to their discredited certainties.

“But certainly many conservatives – the Ross Douthats, the Rod Drehers – do seem to sincerely believe that gay people are nice and decent and make wonderful friends and neighbors and even parents.”

Dreher says this where?

I have myself had medical treatment that turns out to have been harmful, without bearing ill-will toward some of the practitioners involved. I’ve also experience religiously justified prejudicial treatment that I bear a lot of ill-will about.

The difference is simple: the doctors were making good-faith efforts to understand the fact of my condition, the facts of the human body in general, the facts of productive therapeutic response, and like that. In the face of uncertain, turbulent conditions, they proceeded as seemed wise in the light of my experience, theirs, other patients’, and other doctors’ and clinicians’, adjusting as need seemed to be in the light of constant updates.

That’s exactly what the bigots didn’t do, and exactly what Dreher isn’t doing. They are substituting things for honest observation of actually existing persons and their circumstances, or for continued reflection on ongoing experience, or both. That’s also what the doctors I do bear ill will toward did. The threshold is simple enough: when they say “that can’t be right, because I already know X” and then proceed on the basis of what’s in their heads rather than what’s in the world, to the detriment of those they’re acting upon.

There’s kind of a spectrum here, from “I think that the actual cause is something else, for reasons X and Y” to “I know, so certainly that I don’t even have to do diagnostic work nor heed the results if I bother”. Ditto for outcomes from “maybe nothing anyone could have done here would have relieved this suffering” to “this was entirely unnecessary suffering arising entirely from counter-factual justifications for ignoring the realities of the situation”. But the gap between the poles in each case is real and huge.

Rich, a better analogy might be this. Suppose doctors believe that the presence of a certain kind of growth demands major surgery to remove them. Later it turns out that these growths are benign – not the terrible forms of cancer they were believed to be! – and surgery is not needed.

As Bruce suggests, maybe we need to tweak the analogy a little bit. It isn’t that doctors generally believe that surgery is needed; it’s only a particular group of doctors advising this treatment. And it isn’t later that it turns out the growths are benign–there’s evidence that the growths are non-cancerous, and the great majority of the medical profession accepts that, but the group of doctors who are advocating intervention not only want to be allowed to perform the operations, but also demand that insurance pay for the procedures.

I think John’s position is that the doctors are probably sincerely confused, and Rich and others would conclude they are lying charlatans out for a payday at their patients expense.

Does the question of whether they are intentionally inflecting harm depend on whether you side with John or Rich, or is it fair to conclude on the results of the operations that the doctors’ account of their state of mind isn’t particularly important.

To bring in C.S. Lewis again, I think he’s about one-third Benedict option. On the one hand, he tells us Christianity is all about just basically being a good person, getting along in community wih others, being fair and kind and virtuous. On the other, he aligns himself with a certain kind of defense of dead-Enders whose way of life is, to all appearances, doomed, but who have the right to felt they’re essentially good people, all things considered, who have a way of life that mostly keeps them from doing evil, and so on. I’m not sure why this idea should be associated tightly with Christianity, but it seems to be so. (The final third is finding spiritual meaning in literature, or something like that.)

But after seventy or so years, that Defense of the Shire idea is getting taken a lot more seriously, too seriously, and the idea that all good things must come to an end isn’t considered part of it anymore, maybe.

“they’ve never met the God that they created for other people”

Great turn of phrase Rich.

Meaning ” I see that I’ve given the impression that I must think that traditionalists like this are pretty horrible people.”

What Rich says: “Liberals have changed the politics on the ground through a lot of work, forcing conservatives to lie about what they believe in order to appear respectable. When the conservatives then lie, they haven’t changed their positions, and they don’t know better. They’re just lying.”

As for this, it is so much wishful thinking:

“I think Mike Pence sincerely believes he would never discriminate against a gay person, because he’s not the sort of person who would discriminate. … Nevertheless, he favors legislation that is discriminatory.”

But certainly many conservatives … do seem to sincerely believe that gay people are nice and decent … They believe they need to be completely protected against legal discrimination. Yet, for some reason, they still need to be treated as second-class, just ever so slightly. It’s incoherent”

I would think there is a series of tests to clear these up:

a. Do these nice conservatives ever concede that their preferred legislation is discriminatory?

a1. If yes, what do they do in the face of that concession? Do they still go for it? Then you have actual evidence of what side of their “confusion” wins.

a2. If no, then they have a different definition of discrimination than you that allows them to be consistent if they truly believe it (they’re still lying when they say they believe your definition, btw). Ergo, no cognitive dissonance. Now the question is, if you stand by your definition of discrimination, why do you still consider them confused instead of reactionary? (even if we ignore the question of lying).

And as mentioned above by many, a major issue when it comes to sincerity is whether these religious freedom fanatics want to extend the religious freedom to other religions, including Muslims. Do you think they do? Do you have any evidence they do? Not in relation to gays, in general? If not, how does that count towards your belief in their sincerity?

I like the OP and the discussion a lot. But I also think it’s missing something.

So much of the conversation about what “religious freedom” means and is seems to me to miss the way that religious freedom actually operates in liberal societies. And the reason why I think it misses that is because all too often, liberals are not prepared, for whatever reason, to view liberalism as an actual positive creed. We talk a lot about relatively abstract concepts like autonomy and conscience and so on, but what we don’t talk about is the fact that liberal societies fundamentally hold autonomy to be a good thing, in theory if not always in practice. Even conservatives pay liberalism the tribute of adopting its vocabulary because of how influential that vocabulary is; the adoption may be hamfisted (c.f. Anthony Kennedy) or directed toward bad ends (conservatism generally) but words like “freedom” and “choice” are rooted in liberal conceptions of autonomy, even if what they’re being used for is to subvert those conceptions (“Autonomous self conception more important than First Amendment,” whines conservative who could not give fewer shits about either).

Without that acknowledgment that liberalism has actual moral content and isn’t just a neutral set of rules for resolving property disputes or whatever, it’s hard to get anywhere with people like Dreher. The thing is, Dreher is absolutely right to worry about “the secularizing triumph of a new church or ideology,” to use Russell Arben Fox’s excellent phrase, because that is exactly the plan. It’s a plan that is not polite to mention in (politically) mixed company, but it’s still basically the liberal ideal, tacitly assumed. The triumph of secular, liberal institutions over religious ones, such that religion becomes a purely private concern, is what a lot of liberals actually want. The only reason why they’re coy about it is because it’s not nice to say so.

And this gets right to the heart of the whole accommodation puzzle: you get to be accommodated when your accommodation request doesn’t impinge on various other liberal ideals considered to be more important. Want to not work on a Saturday or wear a head covering or not eat pork? Cool beans, we’re broad-minded enough for that because none of those things actually matter. They’re fundamentally private; they don’t really affect the individual’s interaction with the state. But you want to force a woman to change seats on a bus or airplane, or deny your child medical treatment, or discriminate against LGBT people? Well, you can’t do that; that conflicts with all those other liberal values we like more, so tough shit.

Liberals being afraid to say that last part isn’t doing anyone any good. It opens up space for what djw over at LGM called the weaponization of religious exemptions. And that makes sense, because if you can’t confidently assert what you think is the superior moral position and prefer instead to hide behind procedural tricks, you should certainly expect that those procedural tricks will be used against you. Adopting the language of multiculturalism makes sense for the religious right if that’s the procedural route that will get them what they want, just as adopting liberal vocabulary to subvert liberal ideas is a good tactic for them.

Dreher can see all of this because he’s defending a losing front in the culture wars, namely that of LGBT rights and universal marriage specifically, and sexual autonomy more broadly. Liberals tend to either not see it (because it’s a tacit background assumption without need for articulation), or don’t want to acknowledge that they see it (because it’s bad politics).

I say all this as an advocate for the triumph of liberal secularism, broadly understood. I think reproductive rights and sexual and personal autonomy are more important than religious freedom. Not just “religious comfort” but actual religious freedom; you are not free to do something if your doing that thing violates a higher value. Of course, I disagree with the religious right on what things have higher value, but the negotiation of that disagreement cannot proceed on the basis of some proceduralist abstraction. It can only move forward by actual articulation of the values at stake. There are no first-principles derivations of the primacy of liberal secularism; its advocates can only hope to convince more and more people that we are right with the force of our moral arguments. But in order to do that, we have to be willing to actually make those arguments, rather than hide behind procedural screens.

Re: stupid/confused or evil.

It’s a big, both/and world. The foot soldiers aren’t doing some kind of complex political philosophy, they just think gay people are gross and that being “Christian” should grant them privileged status to tell others what to do. The top layer of conservative “intellectuals” (e.g. Robert George, the pseudonymous Kingsfield) also think gay people are gross but they have access to a much more wide-ranging vocabulary to express that sentiment. This makes it possible for them to deceive in creative ways not available to the rank and file.

That’s a moral test distinguishing between “it’s all very well to” and “But once you yourself don’t believe that” on the basis of sincerity.

JH didn’t mention sincerity. I think ‘intent’ is a better word for what he was getting at.

But, broadly, labeling certain people we disagree with as “horrible” isn’t a skillful way to move forward. It’s important and useful to develop compassion for our adversaries. What makes them tick? What is the appeal of orthodoxy? Clearly, ISTM, the appeal of orthodoxy is the (false) sense of stability and order it seems to offer. Religious conservatives are frightened by change, by disorder, by uncertainty. Well, so are liberals and pretty much everyone, but fortunately liberals aren’t as a rule taught to fear disorder. So maybe we tolerate it better than some?

But if our political adversaries are suffering from an excess of fear is there anything we can do to potentially alleviate that? Maybe yes. Maybe engaging them with patience and compassion can help. Labeling them horrible people probably won’t decrease their feelings of being threatened by secular society. Labeling them horrible probably won’t improve our own behavior towards them!

Seems to me that cries for “religious liberty” can easily be tested by asking how willing group A is to extend the same privileges to groups B, C, D & etc. Indeed, doesn’t this quickly imply that the ‘public sphere’ needs to be a neutral space where religious idiosyncrasies must be checked at the door?

So if the baker who doesn’t want to make cakes for gay weddings “shouldn’t be a baker” if he has that attitude, one guesses our poor baker should also be compelled to make cakes for KKK rallies, anti-abortionists and republican caucuses even though they may be equally opposed to those functions and organizations.

Perhaps religious freedom is the wrong grounds to use, but why should the baker be compelled to provide a service he’d prefer not to provide? Up and down this thread people have defended the right of personal autonomy – when does the baker get to not have to bake?

To be clear, I’m not supportive of the Indiana law as originally drafted and don’t think the intent of that law was entirely well concieved – that said, this whole discussion has definitely raise my antanae about where the line is between respecting the rights of one class where it may cause an infringement of the rights of another class.

JH: “I obviously think that conservatives are suffering from cognitive dissonance and are, in effect, trying to spin their way out of moral guilt re: a bunch of inconsistent elements of their moral view. […] I am not sure why you would describe such a roiling state of cognitive dissonance and confabulatory resentment as ‘sincere’. I wouldn’t, so I don’t. ”

I didn’t say that you did. Your original paragraph made a distinction between the traditionalists of before 2o years ago — the one who wrongly but sincerely” believe being gay is always and in every way horrible, miserable, shameful and bad” — and those now, who are suffering from cognitive dissonance and confabulatory resentment. So the sincere traditionalists are, in your description, the old ones, not the new ones.

And your paragraph like it or not says that the old ones are in some sense better than the new ones. It ends with “But once you don’t believe that, would it be ethical [to raise a child that way]”. It’s apparently more ethical to raise a child that way if you sincerely believe that you’re doing good. That was the point of the manslaughter / murder, doctors doing operations that they falsely believe are needed analogies.

But that is the wrong direction. Raising a child that way *always* was wrong, and doing it sincerely is if anything even worse than doing it insincerely, because an impression of sincerity assists in social control. The solution for Dreher et al is not to make themselves a sheltered refuge in which they can recover sincere belief in how horrible gay people are, and go back to crippling their kids in good conscience. The solution is for them to pass through their cognitive dissonance, and since they aren’t going to do that, really the solution is for the natural processes of time to make them and all their ideals pass away.

JH: “In a sense, the first thing is worse. The effect is worse. In another sense, the second thing is worse. The intent is worse. What’s wrong with saying that?”

Effects are measurable, intent isn’t, and this is a public policy discussion. We do treat intent as a factor in criminal cases, but as I understand it this is mainly “intent” as a shorthand for observable behavior, e.g. did the killer spend time beforehand planning the killing, or did they do it impulsively? Did the doctor follow accepted medical practices when they judged that the tumor needed to be surgically removed, or did they operate without regard to proper safety procedures and permissions?

Marshall

But the chosen values need to come from somewhere. It’s no good insisting that the values I can articulate through religious language “must be checked at the door”

I was talking specifically about the public sphere, the place where people of different cultures and traditions interact. And I suggested that it was “religious idiosyncrasies” that probably ought to be held in check in this arena.

If you insist on imposing religious discrimination on people in public life then, if you’re consistent (if you’re willing to reciprocate the respect you’re demanding) you must be willing to suffer the various discriminations that other groups wish to inflict on you.

‘The chosen values need to come from somewhere.’

They are taught by parents, friends, the community at large. And they are taught by experience. “That which is hateful to you, do not do to others,” is a moral teaching AND an hypothesis that can be tested by any person any time they wish to practice it.

Jerry,

It should be noted that answering either of these two questions doesn’t actually require any compassion.

I would tend to disagree. Compassion increases ones ability to put oneself in the shoes of others. We can’t understand people’s behavior without seeing the world through their eyes.

Rich,

I think the purpose of my test is to show that in a multi-cultural society the public sphere should be a ‘neutral’ space. Because it isn’t workable or desirable to have specific groups imposing assorted forms of disrespect on other specific groups based upon religious/cultural differences.

The case you cite is a) fairly hopeless for the 5% no matter what and b) fortunately not applicable to most modern industrial societies.

“I’m sure we can dredge up someone on the internet who feigns that, but for the most part don’t people think that it is ok and normal if minority groups get pissed at someone who publicly denies them service?”

I am not so sure. Check out Redstate on this topic if you are curious. Tons of people their who think it is the height of oppression for people to take issue with a pizza restaurant refusing to cater a wedding.

“Perhaps religious freedom is the wrong grounds to use, but why should the baker be compelled to provide a service he’d prefer not to provide? ”

Wrong question. The right question is, if we have anti-discrimination legislation in place, why should bakers be exempt from it? We aren’t deciding these things on a case by case basis, we’re making laws specifying general rules to be followed in a wide variety of cases. Granting an exception to the baker could open loopholes that would enable more harmful kinds of discrimination.

So if you want to open an exception in this case, you need to specify exactly what this exception would be. Thus far we’ve heard that religious people should be exempt from anti-discrimination laws, or that we shouldn’t ban LGBT discrimination the same way that we ban racial or gender discrimination. It shouldn’t be hard to see why we find those unacceptable–they would extend way beyond the case of bakers or photographers.

There are some others that are possibly acceptable. Perhaps we could limit anti-discrimination to more “important” categories like housing, employment and public accommodations. Which means we would be constantly fighting, from now until the end of civilization, over which businesses offer services worth regulating. Or maybe some kinds of businesses involve more speech and expression than others and shouldn’t be covered by anti-discrimination rules. And, again, we’ll have to constantly fight over which businesses are sufficiently “speech-y” to discriminate. Particularly if that set has to include bakers, which is already a stretch. In any event, I’m not sure there’s much point in discussing this class of possibly-okay exceptions whenever the actual legislative proposals we see all fit into the definitely-not-okay class.

Jerry Vinokurov: . . . liberals are not prepared, for whatever reason, to view liberalism as an actual positive creed. We talk a lot about relatively abstract concepts like autonomy and conscience and so on, but what we don’t talk about is the fact that liberal societies fundamentally hold autonomy to be a good thing, in theory if not always in practice.

Dreher: “There are a lot of conservatives who are very chest-thumping pro-America, but there’s an argument that the seeds of this are built into American individualism,” Kingsfield said. “We Christians have to understand where our allegiances really must to lie. The public schools were meant to make good citizens of us and now are being used to make good Moralistic Therapeutic Deists of us.”

Carl von Clausewitz’s policy analysis of the war isn’t going to tell you much about the character of the fight, or how a grunt soldier experienced the “tactics” of a battlefield skirmish. geo’s plaintive cry, “Do they really believe — or even understand — their own theology?” may well apply as appropriately to the foot soldiers of liberalism as to the foot soldiers of any xian sect. And, the answer will be the same: “no”.

The political fights over “gay rights” and “gay marriage” are in an important sense the latest campaigns in the Sexual Revolution, which took place in the U.S. over the twenty-five year period centered around 1967. That’s when the cultural and legal regime that governed sexuality underwent a profound shift in its default configuration, from an authoritarian model, in which all sexual behavior was licensed and regulated by the state-and-church, to a liberal model, in which all sexual behavior was an autonomous choice, regulated by free contracting between individuals (“consenting adults” etc). The moral props to that ancien regime were not primarily rational or rationalized; it made extensive use of taboo and notions of purity, to police the boundaries. Victorian standards of propriety concerning what was “shocking” played a part in supporting not just censorship of literature, but prohibitions on contraception and inhibitions on “extra-marital” relations. The use of rituals of shame and humiliation played a large part in enforcing the regime, and causing its imperatives to be internalized by individuals.

It does appear to me that the Right on these issues is seeking for some place of traction, where it can again begin shaming and humiliating people for their sexual choices. That might be late-term abortion; it might be cakes and pizzas (!) for gay weddings. And, if it cannot be done in the broad “over”culture, then the question is, how can it be done — the Benedict Option — in subcultures?

Dreher is not arguing against autonomy, per se, as a philosophical concept or proposition; he’s arguing for making a space for creating taboos thru shaming and humiliation, or failing that, for creating subcultures that serve as a cultural refuge — even if it is only a refuge of the mind, where the “christian” pizza proprietor “courageously” stands on her principles. His reactionary’s commitment to hierarchy and moral convention isn’t at bottom, a rational philosophical concept, and he’s not offering it for debate; his commitment to faith is, itself, a rejection of autonomous critical thought as well as autonomy. What he’s exposing to discussion is tactical: in telling the exemplary tale, who is to be the hero, who is to be the goat, and why.

On the other side — the liberal side, my side — I’m not sure that the rationalized philosophy of autonomy has won many converts with abstractions. I’m not sure how to “explain” the Sexual Revolution or its political aftermath. I think it may have been as radical and dramatic, because of the effects of the Great Depression and World War II pressing down, and the post-war rebound, as increased economic security and the erosion of conformity worked their magic. “Freedom” as a concept of ordered liberty probably had less to do with it than the experiential freedom of a Ford Mustang and a decent job in an increasingly urbanized culture.

I might venture one uncomfortable hypothesis: that the mega-Rich by 1970 saw that the ancient practice of divisa et impera had backfired in the New Deal coalition. The balkanized American society, ruled by a WASP ascendancy, which had prevailed through the Progressive Era, had run aground by 1930, and the highly organized subcultures could make their case against oppressions and discrimination and prejudice. Yielding on social issues could take away the organizing traction on economic ones.

The political fights over “gay rights” and “gay marriage” are in an important sense the latest campaigns in the Sexual Revolution, which took place in the U.S. over the twenty-five year period centered around 1967. That’s when the cultural and legal regime that governed sexuality underwent a profound shift in its default configuration, from an authoritarian model, in which all sexual behavior was licensed and regulated by the state-and-church, to a liberal model, in which all sexual behavior was an autonomous choice, regulated by free contracting between individuals (“consenting adults” etc).

The political fight over “gay marriage” looks to me like liberals joining the conservative side of the revolution rather than the radical, trying to establish a norm where gays accept standards of propriety that aren’t quite Victorian but are certainly bourgeois. Conservatives don’t like it, and there are some gay folks who don’t like it either.

Bruce Benderson saw it happening twenty years ago.

The people of the Left have budged during one generation. They have turned a nationwide movement for equal rights that made great strides in the sixties into a covert class agenda. Today their discussions are likely to employ the nuclear-family rhetoric of this class. Their politics have been loaded with the psychic markers of a certain life style: polite euphemisms, nostalgia for rural space, emphasis on Victorian ideas of child protection, reliance on grievance committees and other forms of surveillance, and an unacknowledged squeamishness about the Other. . .

The middle classes of the Left and the Right have conspired to strangle libido, aestheticism, and lower class expression. Because political correctness neglects the embarrassing subject of class, it has been able to become the voice of one ruling class — the homogenized suburban bourgeoisie.

Look, you know that I’m an American Jew, right? 1.4% of the population here are. Your view of a compassionate new step forwards is to tell people that it’s hopeless and / or not applicable?

Rich, you have a talent for creating controversy! Not anything the Jewish culture is known for really… (I wish I had the opportunity to quaff a beverage with you so that I’d have an improved handle on your sense of humor.)

Anyway, NO, my offhand response to your hypothetical IS NOT my blueprint for political action looking forward. To be clear, I took your 95% Christian vs 5% minority as essentially monolithic blocks intended as a counter example to my sketch of various competing cultural/religious groups. I am all for settled Bill of Rights law as you probably suspected anyway.

I do think it is interesting how dynamic religious affiliation in America is. I think that is actually a healthy and hopeful sign for the future. And I’ll grant you that there are some people with frightening religious beliefs… But I don’t think their numbers are that significant. And many such groups are at odds with each other and thus tend to offset each other. Clearly, there is significant homophobia in our culture and this is worth discussing. JH here is observing, accurately I think, that this is a battle the religious right is losing. And that is a major cause of their querulous insecurity.

Hey, thanks for the Apocamon. I have to say it’s pretty well done. I’m glad you didn’t memorize it. You might find something of an antidote to these apocalyptic visions in the so-called god-damn particle.

mattski: ” To be clear, I took your 95% Christian vs 5% minority as essentially monolithic blocks intended as a counter example to my sketch of various competing cultural/religious groups.”

But it was a counterexample based on real percentages. If you’re talking about religion in the public sphere, you’re talking, say, about Nativity scenes during Christmas. Look at the Pew poll that you linked to and add up “Other”, and you get about 5%. (I’d include Mormons in this Othered category for some purposes but not for others, so it might be a couple of percentage points higher.) Another 15% or so is unaffiliated, but that primarily means that they don’t care. So when the perennial question goes up “Why can’t we have a Nativity scene on the Town Hall lawn?” it really is something like 95% vs 5%.

What’s another similar percentage? According to a Williams Institute review in 2011, 3.8% of American adults identify as LGBT.

So compassion has nothing to do with this. Mainstream bigots really are horrible people: they are stopped by laws and by what amounts to left-liberal political victory within this particular sphere. The check on religious discrimination in the public sphere is not that the 5% will then feel free to discriminate in turn: that wouldn’t do anything.

I understand anti-discrimination laws in housing, policing, hospitals, and employment. I’m not sure I understand them in selling non-crucial services, especially non-crucial personal services. Again, do we really have to make a federal case out of it?

Sebastian H: See comment 170

= = = Sebastian H 04.11.15 at 12:03 am
I understand anti-discrimination laws in housing, policing, hospitals, and employment. I’m not sure I understand them in selling non-crucial services, especially non-crucial personal services. Again, do we really have to make a federal case out of it? = = =

And while we’re at it, would could title the legislative acts that allow businesses on the public square to discriminate at will Sundown Laws. I foresee no problems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town

Oh wait, maybe problems. In the northeast US it may very well be that this issue is not only not very important but not even noticed – there are always 5-10 choices for any service you need within a 20 minute drive. In the Midwest and esp the Great Plains, not so much.

So when the perennial question goes up “Why can’t we have a Nativity scene on the Town Hall lawn?” it really is something like 95% vs 5%.

No it isn’t. “Christians” are not a monolithic group in America today. They don’t all have the same desire for public displays of their tradition. They don’t all have the same attitudes towards gay marriage. And the percentage of non-Christians is closer to 20-22%.

But the Nativity scene is a good example because it’s probably less offensive than refusal of services to gays. And it’s a tough question. There are going to be gray areas. But when you say ‘compassion has nothing to do with this,’ I think you’re just showing your bias towards judgement and confrontation. That’s the locus of your skill set. I’m saying, broaden your skill set.

Compassion has everything to do with making the world a better place.

Sebastian H @ 183 assumes the predominant reaction will be angry resentment. But if there’s a large number of people who will weigh pressure to shame people they’re supposed to see as sinful against countervailing pressures, the effect of the law would be otherwise. And every time the law is defeated, people who think that way may actually feel less countervailing pressure than before.

JH: “The question is whether, IF there should be a law requiring bakers to serve gay-marriage wedding cakes, consistency requires that we say there should ALSO be a law, requiring Jewish and black printers to print up sheets for a KKK/neo-Nazi rally, on commercial request.”

This is a bad kind of intuition pumping. You want us to have reactions to words like “KKK” and “neo-Nazi” that are based on history. But we can’t refer to things like “protected classes” — products of that same history — to explain exactly why consistency does not mean that a baker serving gay-marriage wedding cakes is not the same situation as a printer printing up KKK flyers. IF there should be law requiring bakers to serve gay-marriage wedding cakes, in America, then it will use the same framework that came out of 1964, which of course came out of Jim Crow, and in which it was obvious that e.g. florists refusing to serve black people was intended to shame them and drive them away.

There is no “new, expansive ‘public carrier’ legal regime” that anyone is contemplating in the actual world that you are using as a frame for this story — the world that Dreher is supposedly writing about. Instead, there are anti-discrimination laws. If you want an abstract ethical story, you should at least make it about unicorns and greebles. Then I won’t have this feeling that I’m supposed to know something about this story from growing up Jewish in America.

“Once we’ve decided that it’s okay for us to require hotel managers not to discriminate, why is it so unacceptable to make the same requirement of bakers? ”

Because the requirement for hotel managers was made with a much more limited rationale than “nobody should ever discriminate against anything”. Heart of Atlanta Hotel v. U.S. was largely about how important interstate movement, shelter and, housing were , and how tied up they were with the racial animus and Jim Crow.

And you seem to be suggesting that I’m saying it would be unconstitutional to make such laws. I’m merely saying that it is stupid overreach. I’m saying that it is neither good nor desirable to pretend that “non-discrimination in everything” is the most important goal.

You all clearly don’t believe it is, as we can see through discussions of affirmative action.

When it is important, outlaw it. When it isn’t, don’t be such an ass. Look, I’m gay, I’ve been hurt by people not be accepting of that. I had parents that wanted me to go to one of those crazy re-programming ministries when I came out to them. I’ve was chased down the street by thugs who wanted to beat the crap out of me and maybe kill me in the 90s. I’m very sensitive to the idea that it can be a problem when people don’t like gay people. I don’t want people to be fired for being gay, beat up for being gay, killed for being gay, medically untreated for being gay, or unable to find food and shelter for being gay. But when I first heard about the photography case I thought “Quit being such a drama queen and just get someone who isn’t going to fuck up your pictures.”

Some things are worth fighting for, others aren’t. The Indiana law is bad because it opens up the areas which clearly should be protected. But it only got anywhere because of the completely stupid photography case. How about we don’t do stupid overreach and fight over the real cases?

“We are, in effect, contemplating a new, expansive ‘public carrier’ legal regime in which businesses can never refuse customer service, just because they find the form of custom morally unsavory.”

Maybe this is my fault? Did my post @191 convey the impression that I was proposing such a thing? I should clarify, when I said “I don’t really see the point of revising the law to permit more kinds of ‘harmless’ discrimination.”, I was talking about revising the actual, existing law we’ve had for decades, that Sebastian H seems to be in denial over.

I even explicitly said I was (unenthusiastically) open to narrowing the kinds of activities that discrimination laws are applicable to. So as far as desired legal outcomes go, I guess I’m not actually that far from you and Sebastian. It’s just that you two seem to be under the impression that you’re arguing for the status quo, when you’re actually arguing against it?

“But obviously our feeling is: it would be nice if people could opt out of providing these services, if participating really really bothered them. “

I’m not sure this is actually the feeling behind all of those exceptions. Do we really think it would be “nice” if hotel owners could refuse to serve black guests, if we could somehow magically prevent that from inconveniencing black travelers? Anti-discrimination law isn’t just about guaranteeing access to resources and opportunities, it’s also about dignity. Why shouldn’t we be proud that hotel managers can’t discriminate against black guests?

Just because we want businesses to be able to refuse services doesn’t mean it would in any sense be nice if we let them discriminate against protected classes. That’s like arguing that freedom of speech means that it would be nice if we permitted blackmail.

Okay I just read this more carefully.

“We are, in effect, contemplating a new, expansive ‘public carrier’ legal regime in which businesses can never refuse customer service, just because they find the form of custom morally unsavory.”

And, yeah, Sebastian H is definitely correct that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 didn’t imply anything like that. But I can’t figure out why either of you think anybody is asking for that.

No one has commented on saucer guy’s contribution. Well, I kinda like it. Except for the notion that science is going to prove the reality of enlightenment or that psychedelic drugs are an adequate route to it.

I’m a Buddhist; I see all religions as upaya, expedient means. I can read the Surat an-Nur, or Rumi, or Maimonides, or St. Teresa of Avila, or Thomas a Kempis, and say yes, that’s so. I can read George Whitefield’s account of his salvation experience and recognize it. Sure, Buddhists have been and are now violent, persecuting bigots, but that is not everyone. Nor are the bigots and extremists representative of the best of other traditions.

I don’t get it. If white people ever become a persecuted minority, then laws requiring all printers to print KKK materials could be made justifiable. I mean, you can do this all in terms of oughts. The only ‘is’ you need is that white people are not a persecuted minority (neither are Christians, their fervid fantasies notwithstanding) whereas gay people are. Isn’t that what “protected classes” is about?

“I’m fine with this as long as we add that it may be a very shortlived cultural view only because it turns out to be a shortlived problem, culturally. That is, it gets solved in short order to the point where it is not a systematic problem any more.”

Does enshrining it in law help? If you take the view that sexual orientation is

Sebastien H @ 199: “This is legally wrong. The public carrier legal regime absolutely didn’t cover all commerce. To the extent that you think current laws do/should cover all commerce it has nothing to do with the public carrier legal regime.”

In actuality, “public accommodation” is defined as “entities, both public and private, that are used by the public. Examples include retail stores, rental establishments and service establishments, as well as educational institutions, recreational facilities and service centers. Private clubs and religious institutions were exempt.” (quoting wiki). So not all commerce is included, but all retail stores are included. That includes retail florists, bakers, etc.

‘But if someone could provide evidence that apparent animus against gays was motivated by a sincere, general religious conviction – let’s say, our baker also wants to refuse service to divorced people – it would be ideal if this odd gentleman could be allowed to indulge his “Leviticus” literalism in peace. Reason: seriously, there aren’t many people like this.’

I understand that, as a matter of law, there are some exceptions to laws based on religious conviction; but I don’t know why this is necessarily ideal. If the animus against gays was sincere and deeply held but not religious, would it still be ‘ideal’ that this odd gentlement be allowed to discriminate against them in peace? As long as we’re talking about the ideal outcome.

“But once we’ve decided that a kind of discrimination should be banned, religion, even sincere religion, should not be an out. And I don’t see anything ideal about the contrary position.”

I think John states clearly that he thinks discrimination should ideally be allowed, because to not be coerced not to discriminate is part of freedom and freedom is good. Unless of course it results in Jim Crow-ish things, somehow.

JH: “And my alleged motive remains a bit … obscure.”

Your alleged motive is that you like to explore philosophical ideas. Or that you think that following through the logical consequences of an incoherent position like Dreher’s may help to convince people like Dreher that it’s incoherent. Some mixture of those.

But when someone like Sebastian H asks, literally, why we have to make a Federal case out of a florist not serving a gay person, we should at least get the actual history involved correct before we use this situation as a platform for various thought experiments and ethical what-ifs. I think that it’s particularly bad to write things like “Wouldn’t it be good if we had a system in which a Jewish printer didn’t have to print up flyers for the KKK?” when in actual fact, in current America, we have a system in which Jewish printers do not have to print up flyers for the KKK.

In short, your proposal that people be allowed to discriminate in minor ways unless this results in Jim Crow-ish things already exists in our system, and would continue to exist even in sexual orientation became a protected class nationwide. So your continuing to go on about it as if it’s an ideal that we don’t have starts to look a whole lot like you just don’t know what you’re talking about.

John Holbo,

““Do we really think it would be “nice” if hotel owners could refuse to serve black guests”

This is complicated, even if it seems like it should be simple. What makes it complicated is that, in a sense, it would be nice if people are allowed to be flaming assholes. Because if we pass enough laws to ensure that there is no way in which anyone can be a flaming asshole, we will have passed too many laws. That will be not-nice…. it’s not-nice if people don’t have enough freedom to be flaming assholes.”

I kind of doubt your sincerity these claims are so outrageous. How would it be nice if racist hoteliers were able to refuse to serve black people? That is definitely not a nice thing to do at all. Hoteliers should only turn away people if they are drunk and disorderly or wearing the wrong clothes or for some other good reason. It would not be nice for the government to give hoteliers exemptions from anti-discrimination laws to allow them to turn away people because of their race or sexuality etc — that is why doing so is prohibited (except for churches, mosques etc and religious schools).

“But if someone could provide evidence that apparent animus against gays was motivated by a sincere, general religious conviction – let’s say, our baker also wants to refuse service to divorced people – it would be ideal if this odd gentleman could be allowed to indulge his “Leviticus” literalism in peace.”

This would not be ideal at all, unless you have a strange idea of what an ideal town would be like. It would end up causing lots of trouble and upset the peace. It is prohibited for good reasons. If the baker doesn’t want particular customers he can just grumble and be generally rude to them, then likely they won’t be returning, but he might lose other customers as well since everyone would think he was rude, although this might depend on how good his bread and pastries were.

“We are doing this to prevent Jim Crow-type problems. Period.”

That is not true since we have anti-discrimination laws in Australia and we didn’t have Jim Crow laws. Also there were not really Jim Crow laws for women, and anti-discrimination laws prohibit discriminating against women and other groups too.

“It would be nice if the government didn’t have to tell you who to serve and not in your private business. ”

No this would not be nice that is why anti-discrimination laws apply to businesses, and most people think having anti-discrimation laws is the nice thing.

““I think John states clearly that he thinks discrimination should ideally be allowed, because to not be coerced not to discriminate is part of freedom and freedom is good. Unless of course it results in Jim Crow-ish things, somehow.”

Yes, that’s about right.”

I think you should do as bianca steele suggested earlier and write a coda with regard to what the Australian Liberal Party’s view on the issue might be — since their view is everyone should have the right to be a bigot (until public outcry made them change their minds in the short term) and you seem to have a similar sort of view that it would be nice if people could be more bigoted than laws now allow. But I think encouraging bigotry because it somehow seems nice would not be nice but just end up causing trouble and conflict.

Also freedom is not necessarily good, it depends on the matter in question. Freedom to do good things is good, freedom to do neutral things is neutral, and freedom to do harmful things is bad and should be discouraged by laws except where it is impractical like having regulations on behaviour at train stations so lengthy they include prohibitions on not throwing coins on the ground so old women’s backs ache bending down to pick them up. However as such regulations would be too lengthy you could have staff at the train station instead to angrily chase away young men who do this and other offensive behaviour that is too petty to regulate but still not good just because freedom.

JH: “In general, I am aware that the position that I think would be optimal has a lot of points of connection with the situation we have actually got. Although there are also some points of difference.”

Maybe you could explain what those points of difference are, then, because I don’t see any.

Let’s take the sincere Leviticus literalist that you keep using as an example. Let’s say that they have a business called Levi’s in which they make pants in which cotton is not mixed with any other kind of material. If they wholesale the pants rather than retail them, they would not be covered by “public accommodation” law. But let’s say they really want to sell them retail. If they have policies that are applied consistently to everyone, that are not clearly written as an excuse to exclude a protected class, they have a wide latitude of permissible discrimination. But let’s say that’s not good enough for them. In that case, you say, they should still be allowed to sell their pants retail. And current law says they shouldn’t. Is that the point of difference?

Jerry Vinkurov:
you just have to be able to articulate those values in terms that are accessible to everyone.

Well, that’s a losing proposition as glancing through any CT comment thread will show.

mattski:
‘The chosen values need to come from somewhere.’
They are taught by parents, friends, the community at large. And they are taught by experience. “That which is hateful to you, do not do to others,” is a moral teaching AND an hypothesis that can be tested by any person any time they wish to practice it.

People learn their values and how to practice them as children in families, neighborhoods, and other face-to-face communities. They can be modified later in life with effort and usually pain (a prominent argument secularists use against religious education).

The Golden Rule is a value of many religions and is a good entry point but it don’t prove nothing because it begs the question of how much of the other person’s standards are acceptable. It points to compassion or empathy … so how can you be empathetic with someone whose language you refuse to accomodate?

Accepting only the values of the widest possible polity means that the discussion is going to stay extremely simple-minded and worse, leads to a race to the bottom as the trimmers focus on their own self-interest: tragedy of the ethical commons. The present movement towards a right to be publicly gay came about because a minority group insisted on injecting their language into the public discourse.

I think John is right on at 185 and thereabouts, it’s about Jim Crowism. A moderation of flaming assholes can be tolerated and is even an ornament to an intersting, progressive society. Also, today’s FA is very occasionally just someone born out of time: Oscar Wilde, Jesus.

Since I have to travel a bit later today and may not be around, I’ll add a few responses to where I think this is going: if John answers yes to my question in #231, then my response is basically to hell with that. The reason I’ve brought up actually being Jewish in the U.S. is because I’ve actually experienced prejudice, and John’s presumed point of difference with current law is one that I’d attempt to sabotage if it looked like it had any chance of actually being implemented. Unlike John I see no reason to assume that Dreher is sincere: unlike mattski I think that pleas for compassion that are directed towards minority groups in society are kind of wrongheaded. (It’s fine for MLK Jr. to talk about the compassion needed to be in the Civil Rights Movement: having the white moderates counsel compassion is something else.) So this just becomes a test of who can work the system better, and I think that people who think as I do can work it better.

Secondly, the system demands all kinds of restrictions on freedom that rather leave me cold about the presumed point of difference above. For instance, during the Iraq War people had to pay their taxes and support the killing of hundreds of thousands of people in an unjust, aggressive military conquest. I’ve hinted more than once that maybe, if we’re really concerned about individual autonomy, we may have to give up on the liberal order entirely as well as on the opportunities for coercion of right-wingers that it presents. But no takers so far.

Marshall,

You say the golden rule doesn’t prove anything. Is it supposed to prove something? And maybe we shouldn’t be too quick here. If you *practice* the golden rule, over time you may be in a position to draw some conclusions about it.

so how can you be empathetic with someone whose language you refuse to accomodate

Can you help me out here? Who specifically are you referring to?

I think John’s position is one of balancing. Allowing someone to be a jerk is a good thing (because freedom), all things being equal, but if all things aren’t equal, then we need to consider the balance. Hence, the balance shifts if Jim Crow-ish things happen also.

But the assumption that the definition of freedom includes all these freedoms to be an asshole, and every retreat from acting as an asshole is a freedom restriction that needs to be balanced in a consequentialist manner (cost-benefit), is a bit extreme, non-“standard” and not that easy to defend, I think.

parse @ 174: The political fight over “gay marriage” looks to me like liberals joining the conservative side of the revolution rather than the radical, trying to establish a norm where gays accept standards of propriety that aren’t quite Victorian but are certainly bourgeois. Conservatives don’t like it, and there are some gay folks who don’t like it either.

abbe faria @ 177, 179: I think it’s very difficult for anyone to sustain their views given what we know about the history of sexuality.

So much of the thread has been about the minutiae of what are, or should be, the transactional rules of commerce that we lose track of the kulturkampf in which the political fights over what rules should be adopted, and how ideas should change about what those rules mean in the shared construction of mainstream culture. The culture has moved remarkably fast in my lifetime, to the point where even the Pope shrugs his shoulders and asks, “who am I to judge?”

That’s “nice” (certainly nicer than the last Pope’s hypocrisy and arch pronouncements about intrinsic evil), and I approve “be nice” as a general transactional imperative, except, of course, when someone takes me to task for not-being-nice, which sometimes I’m not. Not quite Kant, and not quite “don’t be a jerk”; more like my mother’s admonitions not to upset anyone at the dinner table or to shout in the house.

The transactional “nice” or “don’t be a jerk” analysis, though, leaves the whole regime of control of sexuality out of account. At most, we get some side-glance at “Jim Crow”, which, of course, was a moniker for a racial scheme, to which analogies were drawn, back in the days of Stonewall and all that, but not the actual regime of sexual control, to which repression of homosexuality and oppression of homosexuals attached.

Maybe that’s OK. For the moment of liberal triumph, the reactionaries are disadvantaged by having to adopt the vocabulary of liberal transactionalism and criteria of implicit utilitarianism. Bourgeois marriage, with family planning, at-will divorce and no jail-time or embroidery for adulterers let alone catamites, looks pretty good. Will reactionaries turn at some point, abandoning the hapless baker, and go after, say, the gay bathhouse?

At various points in the past, the reactionaries have won. I’m not sure about how or why, exactly.

abbe faria raises the most interesting question to me: whether the category “gay” refers to a reliable salient of personal sexual identity. Under a liberal regime, with its emphasis on individual autonomy, maybe it doesn’t matter much — the culture is fluid enough that various experiments can go forward and concepts will evolve. On the other hand, the economic foundation for individual autonomy is eroding pretty fast for at least half the population in the U.S. and large parts of the rest of the developed world.

Of course there is balancing here, where I think the disagreement lies is in who is balancing who.

JH sees, I think, a balancing between the ideal of religious liberty/tolerance, and the pragmatic consequences of discrimination/Jim Crow. I guess it would be as Marshall said–“freedom of association vs. historical context”.

Some of us might see things vice versa–a balance between the ideal of equality under law, and the pragmatic consequences of edge cases like whether use of otherwise proscribed drugs should be allowed in religious ceremonies. So, to me, something like the federal RFRA of 1993 represents a a sort of messy yet indispensible duct tape hack for a difficult problem, rather than an ideal to aspire to. Or equality under law vs. historical context.

I think John’s position is one of balancing.

I get that. But I think if you apply it to Jim Crow cases, you get a seriously weird result: Racist fucks having the freedom to oppress black people considered in itself is “nice”—it’s a type of freedom and freedom is good, so this is also (considered as such) good. Except that it’s outweighed by the harm caused to black people so shouldn’t be allowed. Maybe this is how JH wants to conceptualize these kinds of cases; I think this is fucking insane. (In any case, I don’t think we’re really disagreeing.)

Rich, you lost me there. From a philosophical discussion you got down to the details of a political compromise. I am not sure this sort of change of “venue” is helpful

Just to take things in a different direction, I share ZM’s doubts at 125 about an opposition between Christianity and autonomous selves. Not just for the obvious reasons that we’re supposed to have free will and individual souls. There’s all the Christian stories of righteous individuals being persecuted by sinful communities. There’s the medieval scholastics who kept the tradition of rationalism alive in the West–including logic and argument, which both presuppose individual judgment.

Ultimately, a proselytizing religion must embrace individuals making choices on their own experience–proselytization inherently depends on overturning somebody else’s orthodoxy. The missionary must leave their community and convince individuals of other communities–by good works, arguments, miracles, whatever.

Now I guess what these people want to say is that while meaning is something that can be understood or apprehended by individuals, it isn’t something that’s decided or created by individuals. But that’s not an argument against liberalism, autonomy, or individual choices, that’s an argument against relativism.

boilerplate liberalism

It’s not really “my view” (and I’m not sure it’s boilerplate), but I do think you have to take on some basic liberal premises and assumptions to find this sort of thing interesting. I really liked the OP because I thought it maneuvered dexterously through some dark alleyways in the Land of Public Reason. (At least that’s how I was reading it because I couldn’t give a fuck about Dreher—I don’t even know who he is.) And again, while that’s not a conception I’d defend at the end of the day, it is something I find fascinating. And it’s a kind of intra-liberal issue, and if you don’t care about that sort of thing at all, then yeah, this whole argument is going to seem utterly pointless, I’d imagine.

Well it’s a bullying prevention thing rather than a code of conduct and having one is mandated by the state government – so if the schools didn’t prevent bullying appropriately then students or parents can take the issue to the department. So it is more than a voluntary code of conduct actually.

And the pizza people are being jerks, too. And the bakers and the florists. They just want to make perfectly nice people feel bad about themselves.

This is a strange thing to say. If the problem was just that they were trying to make, or successfully making, other people feel bad about themselves, then everything you’re saying would make sense. What they’re doing though is refusing to provide services that it’s at least entirely possible aren’t available otherwise. Or at least, aren’t available otherwise given other constraints that might be present in a given case. That’s surely what you need to prevent. I mean, of course, let people make other people cry to their hearts’ content. I’d hardly want to prevent that!

But this is exactly what I was getting at — we have a Civil Rights Act of 1964, not a Don’t Be A Jerk Act of 1964. It doesn’t ban acts of making other people feel bad or uncomfortable: it bans acts of refusing service to protected classes by people running public accommodations. Mixing the two of them up is trivializing the issue.

“I’m in favor of discrimination because I want the Jewish deli owner to not have to cater for the neo-Nazi rally. I want people to have some freedom as to whom they do NOT want to work for/associate with.”

And they have that freedom. And Dreher wasn’t talking about this really in any way, so … let the straw man burn out already. No one is an anti-discrimination absolutist to the point where they say that no one can discriminate for any reason. I’m sure that Dreher would be glad to say “Hey, we let the Jewish printer discriminate against neo-Nazis, so why can’t a Christian baker discriminate against gays?” And explaining why gets into the same actual history that you vaporize whenever you bring this up again.

js.,

You seem unable or unwilling to countenance a distinction between groups that are oppressed and groups that aren’t.

That could be difficult to determine. Sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes it isn’t. More often than not it’s disputed.

Rich,

So this just becomes a test of who can work the system better, and I think that people who think as I do can work it better.

I think there is some merit to this. Like, “he may be a jerk, but he’s our jerk.” Not being snarky. I’m often guilty myself. But the ‘system’ gets worked through many channels. And in the aggregate the sort of ‘psychic violence’ that you rely on is subject to similar failures of the physical violence that MLK denounced.

John Holbo,

“[js] Maybe this is what is confusing you. You think that, if I think you shouldn’t go to jail just for being a jerk, that therefore I think being a jerk is protected. Ergo, you can’t go to jail so long as you are being a jerk. No.
….
I should have said it would be nice, not because it would be nice if they did, but because it would be nice if, in general, people have freedom.”

I really don’t think js or anyone else thought you were making the extremely odd argument that so long as illegal acts were committed by jerks or by people who had the intentions of being jerks, the illegal acts should not be prosecuted due to exemptions for jerks in all laws.

Anyway, now I can return to my example of Jonathan Franzen and freedom and jerkiness and wrongness.

In the good conduct on train stations example where he was a jerk this is reasonably petty, so only a light punishment or being dragged by the nose and tree planting in bird habitat should be countenanced.

In the other example of him writing in the New Yorker he should not be held accountable for his personal activities emitting greenhouse gasses, nor should anyone propose widespread laws on greenhouse gas emoting as that is puritanical, and he enjoys contemplating his death and the death of the planet at the same time, so flying to South America to see far away bird conservation efforts makes him just as good as Saint Francis –
Well as you can see this is not petty wrongdoing like the other example, but a serious and conscious embrace of wrongdoing.

It is not good that Jonathan Franzen has the freedom to do this – it surpasses the petty wrongness of just being a jerk

Your freedom argument is problematic here. It is not nice to let Jonathan Franzen decide he may as well ruin the world – obviously leniency towards train station platform behaviour has led to something worse in his case – he even wrote his book Freedom about this issue

The commenter Ben on the gorrrr thread said this in regards to Jonathan Franzen about elite attitudes to freedom and climate change :

“that global capitalism’s march of death is to be embraced; that an intensely selfish and narcissistic progressive hedonism is the only respectable way to live; basically, the celebration of the cheapening (in every sense) of human life – and voicing them in a mainstream, centrist, establishment organ.

It’s a canary in the coal mine observation, basically, and I’ve been noticing similar wafts of Thanatos from elite opinion recently. That kind of ideological production is . . . worrying.”

JH: “But I want to clarify why it makes sense for it to be that way, more or less, so we know how to adjust it – expand it, contract it – around the edges. You think all the answers hereabouts are obvious, Rich. So you are not interested in any attempts to clarify why the law should be one way or the other. ”

Of course I’m interested in attempts to clarify why the law should be that way. How many times do you think I’ve typed 1964 in this thread? I’ve said, over and over, that the law can’t be clarified abstractly: it has to be clarified with reference to actual history.

As for attempts to adjust, expand, or contract it, I’ve written some things about that too. So you can see what I’m talking about, I’ll try a different issue: environmental laws. Here’s a list with the major ones bolded. Look at the weird time clustering that’s going on. You’ve got 1963, eight bolded laws (plus the Endangered Species Act) 1970-1976, 1980, 2 in 1986, 1990. Nothing major since then. We are actually incapable of adjusting, expanding, or contracting major laws because of the radical right. If we do get sexual orientation added as a protected class, it’s going to get plugged right into language from 1964.

We’re not engaging with Rod Dreher. He’s not here. Even his source post is not really being read directly (or, as Bruce Wilder found out, if you do read it directly you get very sad about your dying neurons), we’re engaging with your version of it.

As for why I participate in the thread, you really are being a bit jerky about this. Here’s what I got to do in the thread so far:

* discuss and agree with Russell Arben Fox about some differences between political goals of majoritarian religious communities and actual minority ones;

* clarify what _The Nurture Hypothesis_ is about;

* begin to describe the problematics inherit in liberal anti-discrimination thought from an anarchist viewpoint, and point out that how that “how to protect children from being raised by right-wingers” is actually high on the list of important social control provisions of liberals I’ve talked to;

* review once again that a) right-wingers lie in response to liberal victories and b) they harm people whether or not they are sincere, vs your emphasis otherwise (OK, that part wasn’t so much fun);

* in response to Sebastian H’s “why do we have to make a Federal case out of this”, try to allude to and then actually explain the history behind why we make a Federal case out of this, complete with the actual meanings of phrases like “public accommodation”;

* in response to Trader Joe wondering why bakers had to make cakes for the KKK and asteele saying that actually they didn’t have to, went into more detail on why they don’t have to. (Which you clarified in the other direction.)

Etc. Yes, your original post was about a sow’s ear that you failed to turn into a silk purse, but I don’t actually read or comment on CT mostly because of the original posts.

” The wrong way to approach that project is to look at marginal situations and ask “should the government ban this activity?” Because that’s never the question the legislature is faced with.”

Aaack. This is precisely why conservatives gain so much traction with the idea that government busybodies are so ridiculously overbroad. Of course when you write a law you should try to look at the margins and figure out whether or not the government should ban this activity. That is your whole job. It is disturbing that you might think that isn’t an important function of writing a law.

Honestly, this post leaves out too many steps in its reasoning to be useful.

“to say that Jewish bakers refusing to serve Neo-Nazi types vs. whitey bakers refusing to serve gay couples is that gay people are an oppressed group and white people are not. ”

If Jewish bakers refused to serve white gentiles good bagels, I would not be pleased to tell you the truth, even if white gentiles are not oppressed and could buy not so good quality bagels elsewhere. Happily I have never heard of a Jewish baker in the city doing this.

I think the difference is not that white people are oppressed — but that Neo-Nazi groups are horrible and are actively trying to oppress the ethnic and/or religious group that the Jewish baker belongs to. If a baker started refusing to serve girl guides for some reason, I don’t think that would be right. And although I suppose all the shops could enact a boycott of particular customers and refuse to serve all known local neo-nazis, I am not sure that starving neo-nazis is the right thing to do either (although I am a bit unsure about where you should draw the line with refusing neo-nazis. I suppose you could report them for hate speech instead of all the shops refusing to serve them and then the police could deal with the issue of the neo-nazis instead)…

“I’m in favor of discrimination because I want the Jewish deli owner to not have to cater for the neo-Nazi rally. I want people to have some freedom as to whom they do NOT want to work for/associate with.

Now, you might get confused now and say: but that’s not being a jerk. And you are right. I’m in favor of discrimination because in a lot of cases, discriminating isn’t being a jerk at all.”

Then why do you have such a hard time discriminating between the cases discrimination is “being a jerk” and the cases where it’s not? Why do you have to bring Jim Crow into it? Bakers discriminating against gays: Being a jerk. I say that doesn’t have to be an allowable way of being a jerk. Why are you in favor of allowing *this way* of being a jerk to the point of advocating in a number of places in this thread that maybe this should be allowed? (in other places, you say it shouldn’t be allowed, you’ve really muddied the water on this).

I agree with you (as does everyone on the thread) that being a jerk should be (and is) allowed, btw. I am not sure why you keep repeating it as if it’s a point of contention or needs to be clarified. As to your reply to Bob McManus, he specifically asked for examples that are not speech (hence protected) and you gave him speech examples… (unless trolling is a speech-act? Is it?)

All I have been doing is clarifying exactly what makes this sort of legislation make sense.

Jesus, seriously!? Well, apologies. (Tho frankly, you could use being a little more direct sometimes; and I still think the Jewish baker analogy is misplaced, at least if I’m understanding it right.)

Re: 287:

I claim, pace 285, that the baker should still not be allowed not to serve random people based on whim, even Neonazis — even though as a practical matter there can’t be any consequences for random acts of “discrimination”, the admin cost is just too high, and the priority too low.
The printer and the Neonazis are another matter. I am not exactly ready to explain why/how — but it feels too blunt an instrument to generalize from this situation to all service providers.

Btw, I am still very worried about how such exceptions or non-exceptions play out in a business context: It seems we are wringing our hands about coercion by law too much and coercion by boss too little.

I didn’t mean to connect them in this way. The connection I was pointing out was that, no matter what happens to the baker’s freedom in your by now infamous example, the baker’s employees will get no accommodation either way. So you seem to be worried overly much about the “job creators” and not at all about the freedom (to be a jerk or to discriminate) of employees

The Jewish baker could not refuse to serve the Neo-nazi for being a neo-nazi here, as political views are protected. If the Neo-nazi was offensive and caused trouble then that would be a reason to not serve him and if he vilified the baker that would be illegal. Also the Leviticus reader who does not like divorcees would not be able to discrimate either as they are protected too.

“In Victoria it is against the law for someone to discriminate against you because of a characteristic that you have, or that someone assumes you have. These personal characteristics include:
age; carer and parental status; disability (including physical, sensory and intellectual disability, work related injury, medical conditions, and mental, psychological and learning disabilities); employment activity; gender identity, lawful sexual activity and sexual orientation; industrial activity; marital status; physical features; political belief or activity; pregnancy and breastfeeding; race (including colour, nationality, ethnicity and ethnic origin); religious belief or activity; sex; personal association with someone who has, or is assumed to have, one of these personal characteristics.
It is also against the law to sexually harass or victimise someone, or to vilify someone because of their race or religion.”

It is lazy to just say ‘discrimination’ and think you should be able to invoke the entire history of black people in support for your current cause.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 doesn’t just cover race, though, it also covers religion, gender, and national origin. We didn’t hand-tailor a specific set of protections for black people, we wrote a set of protections for a number of previously discriminated against groups. And looking at the full set of groups, sexual orientation/identity doesn’t seem out of place on the list.

If we want to recognize that some of these groups received much more abuse the others, the proper avenue for addressing that would probably be monetary reparations.

“And despite Rich’s constant refrain of ‘public accommodation’, it wasn’t at all clear in 1964 that we should apply it to services off site (i.e wedding photographers).”

No, it wasn’t, but it was clear that it went further than the sort of narrowly enumerated lists you gave at 180 and 183.

It also wasn’t clear than it didn’t cover those services. One could imagine a community in which no one was willing to provide catering, decorating or photography services to your wedding. This would be a significant obstacle to holding a wedding in that community.

You can say that’s merely hypothetical. But note that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 doesn’t require you to prove that a particular form of discrimination is actually imposing Jim Crow-like hardship. It’s not like anti-trust law in which you have to prove someone is a monopoly before you regulate them–the protected classes don’t have to prove that the baker is actually successful in oppressing them. This is for obvious reasons–if victims did have to prove that, we would constantly be in a liminal state in which discrimination was almost, but not quite Jim Crow-like

Sebastian H: ” It is lazy to just say ‘discrimination’ and think you should be able to invoke the entire history of black people in support for your current cause. […] Not every ‘protected class’ really needs to be protected the way black people did/do”

That’s a reasonable argument, but I’ve already addressed it. That’s what the list of environmental laws up in #270 was about — pointing out that the U.S. does not currently have the ability to re-open old legislative deals. Maybe there should be some kind of fine-grained differences in how different protected classes are protected, but if so we can’t do that. Why can’t we do that? Because we have one of our major parties that is organized around holding on against 1964 (metaphorically and literally) that will sabotage any new attempted deal, and the other party that has to counter-sabotage any attempt to drop old legislation by the first.

As Consumatopia writes just above, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 wasn’t written to protect just race and color as protected classes (or even national origin, which could be a proxy for that). It pretty significantly includes sex and religion. So the people who wrote it and voted on it already considered what you’re writing and rejected it in favor of making a framework that would be used for all kinds of discrimination against protected classes.

Here is my question: would it be “nice” that a group of people have the freedom to use DDOS attacks to coerce a corporation to fire an individual they don’t like? What distinguishes them from ordinary religious believers? They seem very much the same to me in many ways. And I don’t think patriarchy is the most important one, unless we mean by patriarchy something a bit classist, like rich white men get privilege rightly, but it’s racism for the majority of white men to get the same rights.

A home health nurse offended by the gay art should be able to decline the income from her services.

See how liberal I am!

Sebastian H: “This distinction has been under constant attack in the courts by those who want to change “public accommodation” to include essentially everyone who has any kind of office, or in fact provides any kind of service in the stream of commerce.”

Everyone agrees that “public accommodation” doesn’t cover wholesale business, or businesses providing services to other businesses generally. That’s a whole lot of commerce.

But this just gets back to what I’ve been writing — if you want to clarify or explain anti-discrimination, there’s no way to do so abstractly. If you were starting from a blank slate, then all of these questions are obvious. Why should we treat all kinds of disadvantaged minority groups in the same way? Shouldn’t we make fine distinctions between services that are really important and those that aren’t? Isn’t housing more important than flowers?

But we’re not starting from a blank slate. We’re starting within a system in which major legislative change is very difficult, so most change is legal-interpretive, regulatory, or executive. We’re going to be arguing about the meaning of words from 1964 for a long time, so we have to start out by at least understanding the current meaning of those words.

This is also a large reason why the conflict is over gay marriage, of course. Marriage exists as a social institution with a defined role in government, so we can argue about how to reinterpret those rules.

“Ok, so why don’t we use regulatory or executive change to go back to the less than-a-decade-ago status quo on what counted as enforceable discrimination.”

I could quibble about what really counts as hyper-modern, but OK. Note that the original definition all the way back at the beginning covered restaurants, so the pizza place in Indiana would have been covered from the start unless it was considered to be a caterer (and it never actually catered anything). Since we’re stuck with certain legislative language, we could in theory set back the clock and return to earlier regulatory interpretations. This doesn’t mean that we get to consider the case abstractly: our range of actions is still constrained by how we interpret “public accommodations”.

So why not go back to earlier versions? Well, I don’t want to. And since a significant group of people like me doesn’t want to, we will sabotage any attempt to. Since we will succeed in this, barring some unusual change in U.S. governance, you don’t actually have the ability to do it. So although in an abstract sense you could consider this to be an option, it really isn’t.

Why don’t people want to? There are various reasons, of course, and I couldn’t speak for everyone. I don’t want to because I don’t respect the system at all and I see no reason to make it easier on bigots.

Bruce Wilder said it in a much more respectable fashion than I did, but I’d disagree mildly with this: “The leveraging of civil rights non-discrimination principles has been initiated by reactionary conservatives […]”. I would say that this leveraging began when people who were concerned about discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation “leveraged” or reused an existing legal framework that had been created for other similar forms of discrimination.

If there had been a good faith effort on the part of reactionary conservatives to create a new framework for measures against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, perhaps this leveraging wouldn’t have been necessary. But of course no such good faith effort was offered or really possible. So I suppose that one could blame the conservatives again, except that the game of who did it first has limited value.

Here’s something interesting about the 1964 law. It explicitly covered “any motion picture house, theater, concert hall, sports arena, stadium or other place of exhibition or entertainment” as public accommodations. Why is that interesting? Those are, after all, on-site services, exactly what Sebastian is talking about.

Consider what that list of services says about the purpose of the law. It is not to guarantee people’s access to services. There is no federal law guaranteeing your access to entertainment services, like some kind of movie theater equivalent of Universal Service goals for telephone networks. And, if anything, talking about a “right” to entertainment is even more dubious than talking about a “right” to wedding services.

No, the purpose was to protect protected classes from harassment and institutional humiliation. To get rid of all the No Negroes signs and Colored sections in commercial establishments. And once we’ve accepted that as the goal, then it doesn’t make sense to limit these protections to essentials like food, shelter, medicine and travel.

I’ve said a number of times I don’t have a firm opinion on what the federal law actually covers. But I do know that the core rationale of the law is completely different than what Sebastian has in mind, and possibly also John H as well.

No, Sebastian, you’re misreading me. I just said “Those are, after all, on-site services, exactly what Sebastian is talking about.” and “I’ve said a number of times I don’t have a firm opinion on what the federal law actually covers.”

What you’re wrong about is the rationale for the law. You think it was about protecting access to services. So, to you, it would make sense to limit it to somehow crucial, necessary, or essential services. Not that you’re saying that the law is limited to these (although it seems to me that back around 180/183 you were saying that), but that you would prefer if the law were limited to these.

But the law wasn’t about guaranteeing access to services at all. No one created a “right” to movie theaters or stadiums. What the law said was that these services, essential or inessential, important or unimportant, aren’t allowed to degrade protected classes by excluding them or segregating them.

On another note, while it may be the case that you think home medical services should be covered by anti-discrimination law, under your interpretation of the 1964 law they actually are not protected. Right? Whether the service is on-site or off-site is orthogonal to how important that service is.

“No, the law said that open to the public forums had to really be open to the public (on site).”

Even if that were true, much of what you’ve written about essential or necessary services is completely off-base or besides the point.

But actually, that is not true. They don’t just have to be open to the public. They also can’t be separate but equal. They can’t have White and Colored sections.

Could this be solved by a law that required all businesses other than those forbidden to discriminate to accept all customers unless they posted a large sign listing the categories of people to whom they objected? As in “We do not accept Catholic, Jewish or Non-Heterosexual clients”. How could they object to such a requirement?

And I have a little list, I have a little list….

1. You said it would be nice because freedom if hoteliers didn’t have to serve black people – this is like Dreger’s first argument that because liberalism orthodox groups should be able to practice discrimination of they like

2. Then you modify this saying 1. is right except in Jim Crow type situations – this is like Dreher saying orthodoxy and its discriminations are only a problem if there is hegemony and no exit

I think we might be almost entirely in agreement as to underlying positions, we just managed to mutually misunderstand each other multiple times.

“ZM, maybe this will help. I think it would be nice if Rod Dreher could get what he wants. It doesn’t follow that I agree with him that it should be permissible for him to get what he wants. In fact, I don’t think he should get what he wants.”

Not really, it is contradictory. Why think it would be nice if he could get what he wants and also that he should not get what he wants? The two are inconsistent.

That is not an equivalent example at all to discrimation – it is the opposite for Heaven’s sake.

Smith wants to punch Jones on the nose. It would not be nice if Smith punched Jones on the nose. Punching noses is not nice and therefore impermissible.

That is more of an equivalent to discrimination.

“You didn’t ask for an example that was ‘equivalent’ to discrimination. You asked for an example. I gave you one.’

But the discussion is about discrimination ! of course I wanted an example that was equivalent to discrimination. My example was a regular main street punching on the nose in anger event – regular punching someone on the nose in anger is assault and is not nice.

I did not mean punching on the nose in boxing , anyway I do not like boxing and would be quite happy if it was banned to be honest since it encourages violence and gives people brain damage.

Punching on the nose – in a regular Main Street way – is harmful – that is why it is not nice and is assault and thus can be used as a equivalent to discrimination.

Your boxing example is no use for the issue of discrimination since it involves people who agree to permit another person to harm them and give them a crooked funny looking broken nose. That is not equivalent to discrimination unless you are talking about role-play discrimination in your mock orthodox kink club.

Except the discussion was not talking about role-play discrimination, but real discrimination by shopkeepers and hoteliers.

Now I’m going to cook dinner.

(interrupting cooking – must switch off phone after this last comment)

No you are completely on the wrong track.

If the discussion is about Dreher wanting to be able to engage in discrimination it is not very useful to introduce an analogy of Smith wanting to have sex with Jones because discrimination against people is an inately negative category of behaviour. If you changed your example to Smith wants to rape Jones – then rape is also innately negative so that would be an analogy of a sort though in doing so you would offend Dreher no doubt.

Everything anyone could ever possibly want to do is not necessarily nice just because someone wants to do it. Murder is also not nice. Pushing someone off their bicycle is not nice. Bullying someone is not nice.

Your analogy doesn’t work because you don’t seem to understand discrimination is not nice behaviour*

That is how you end up with it would be nice if Dreher could be discriminatory, but discrimination although nice should not be permitted – which is a contradiction

Maybe you could say, it would be nice if Dreher did not want to impermissibly discriminate against people – that solves the whole problem and would be consistent.

* in this meaning of the word. In the meaning where you are a discriminating reader, or quaffer of wine etc that is fine since it is a different meaning.

John Holbo you are just being patronizing now.

It was you not me who introduced the term “nice “into this discussion of discrimination – because you said it would be nice if so and so could discriminate – I was just following your choice of words.

You did not define your use of the word nice except to say freedom is nice, therefore being able to discriminate is nice (which is wrong because then being free to murder people or punch them in the nose would be nice too – here I introduce you to my book’s spectrum of not nice!)

Surely then the onus is on you to define what is nice, what is freedom, what makes freedom good, what constitutes a harm, and what exactly are rights …

There are two meanings of impermissible – morally or legally. i remain completely befuddled why you think Dreher being able to discriminate against gay people would be “nice” and why you have “no problem” with him wishing to make this legally permissible – either you think it is morally wrong so you are inconsistent – or you agree with Dreher that homosexuals should be discriminated against.

It is very patronizing to suggest that I am some simple dimwit who can’t read and write and think so just think things are “nice” for no reason :/ like people in the past who discriminated against gay people.

My understanding is people who go to bondage clubs think that they are nice and there is an element of role play involved etc The clubs are regulated so I doubt much injury is legal and they are not allowed to be in certain areas. I think this is fine. If people are actually being hurt badly I do not think it is ok, but that is not my understanding.

I think you drawing analogies between bondage clubs and churches/communities of faith is drawing a long bow though. Churches are not regulated like bondage clubs, are allowed most places, and children can enter them etc They are treated quite differently – and I think you have a bit of an odd idea that they are the same since they both have memberships and cultures.

As I said I would be quite happy if boxing was banned since it is harmful eg brain injury. Also discrimination should be banned (not the wine and reading kind).

Turning the tables – why do you think discrimination is nice? And what do you mean by nice in that sense?

Maybe Dreher can write a blurb for my book ;)

JH:
“Smith wants to have sex with Jones. It would be nice if Smith could have sex with Jones (because he wants to). ”
and
” It’s exactly parallel to saying it would be nice for Smith to be able to have sex with Jones”

These two are not the same. Focusing on the original, the first, it’s definitely NOT nice if Smith could have sex with Jones (because he wants to) without taking into account Jones’ desires. In other words, satisfying his desire without taking into account the other person’s desires/needs is definitely NOT nice, in very many philosophies, and definitely in liberalism. It’s not “something nice in the abstract but not allowed because costs”. It is NOT nice. John, I take it you disagree with this. What about it do you disagree with?

And btw, the analogy with discrimination indeed holds: It is not nice if Dreher can discriminate against gays because he wants to, regardless of costs/Jim Crow etc, because it demeans other people. It may be the case that we may want to allow legally some not-nice things perhaps, but this is not-nice for sure (and I also think not one of the not-nice things that should be allowed).

BTW: we’re talking about large parts of Red Amurka wanting to discriminate against gays and you talk about “small illiberal communities”. Small? Seriously? Losing a job in a small town in Texas, it’ll be easy to find another employer? With a crimson G stitched on you?

Oops. Should be “re-use of *existing* frameworks and so on.”

I agree that the nice vs not-nice thing was a bad idea from the start. Let’s just take it a step further and say that instead of Smith wanting to have sex with Jones, Smith wants to be Caligula and generally be free to have sex with, torture, and execute everyone around him, not in a BDSM play-acting sense, but in a real and actual non-consensual sense. That’s freedom, right? Smith would be free to do whatever he wants. Isn’t it nice when people get greater freedom?

Against this, John Holbo says that Dreher is really a nice guy, or has desires to do bad things that conflict with other desires to be a nice guy. For which I say as I have through this thread: what’s the evidence for this. He wants to discriminate against gays for religious reasons. It’s obviously nonconsensual. The only evidence that he’s really a nice guy is in John Holbo’s head somewhere.

Thanks to the many who took a view on my “When does the baker get to not bake?” question….it seems to have sparked quite a line of discussion – informative in both directions.

A thought that occurs to me about the Civil Rights act of 1964 and its applicability in a sexual orientation exclusion is that for the most part, sexuality is something the individual must make known to the “discriminator” in order for it to become a potential vector of discrimination. A black or a woman are identifyable on sight. A person of a certain religion – far less so, but sometimes, and a gay/lesbian person really not at all more often than not.

So in the case of our baker, it would only be at the point that the buyer, say, asked for two grooms on the cake or asked the insription to say “good luck John and Jim” that he would even likely have refused the transaction. Odds are if either John or Jim came in and bought a baguette there’d have been no discussion whatsoever of sexuality and therefore no discrimination whatsoever.

It seems like this transforms the discrimination in an important way – not necessarily to make it “right” or “nice” but that there is an element of political or free speech or free exercise of religion involved on the part of the ‘discriminator’ that is a little different than hanging a sign that says “No blacks, jews or gays” and refusing service on sight.

Not sure what its apropos of, but I find myself wanting the baker to have some rights to decide who to do business with, but at the same time thinking it completely wrong that he can discriminate on what I might view (but others might not) as arbitrary grounds.

Increasingly bizarre (unsurprisingly) but maybe I can make a useful suggestion.

If anybody really thinks it a good use of your time to debate whether or not Dreher should “get what he wants” (JH 332), wouldn’t it be useful if you could start by spelling out what it is that he wants? Because he himself doesn’t anywhere in his overlong tirade make any specific statement about what he wants. All he does is making multiple allusions to what he doesn’t want (essentially, liberalism and tolerance). The rest is guessing. Could it really be that you haven’t noticed that, John, despite spilling thousands of words on Dreher exegesis?

Only for the sake of logic: “It would be nice if everybody could get what they want” can be parsed two ways: (1) you are wishing for a universe were everybody only wants what they will also get, or (2) you are wishing for a universe where the laws of logic don’t apply, because logically it wouldn’t be possible if Smith wants sex with Jones but Jones wants no sex with Smith that both get what they want. In either case, I doubt you really think that these hypothetical universes would be “nice”.

JH: You didn’t write: It’s nice that Smith wants to have sex with Jones. You wrote: “It would be nice if Smith could have sex with Jones (because he wants to). ”

And I say, this is NOT nice. If you think it’s only nice if Jones consents, then you should have written it. Because Smith’s desire is not contingent on Jones’ consent, clearly (you write as much). So, if Smith could have sex with Jones (because he wants to), there is at least one case (of two possible cases) where it would NOT be nice.

OK, here’s #2 on Rod Dreher’s Greatest Peace and Tolerance Google Hits: Why Don’t the Muslims Like Poor Rod Dreher?

I have to say that I admire his style. If I ever get invited to be on one of the interfaith tolerance things, I’ll make sure to look up their board first and see whether anybody was ever alleged to be guilty of anything. Lots of fun!

“What I am saying is that, ceteris paribus, it is nice if desires can be fulfilled rather than frustrated. It is a rather trivial point. And it is truly the point I was making.”

No, this is not right. Everything is not nice! It is nice when nice desires are fulfilled – if someone wants to murder someone (a harmful non-consensual act) the fulfilment of their desire is not nice! Murder is not nice!

Is desiring to discriminate against gay people and refusing to serve them raspberry and pastry cream tarts is nice? No , this is not nice!

If Smith walks into Jones bakery and asks to have sex with Jones , and Jones is all dude I am not gay sorry it just wouldn’t feel right plus I’m pretty busy baking right now, then it is nice! for Jones the baker not to have to provide sex to Smith.

But if all Smith wants is a raspberry and cream tart – then it is nice! for Jones to provide the pastry as requested for a small charge.

If however Jones said instead – dude you’re gay so I’m not selling you any pastries I’m part of the Dreher Christian club of boycotting bakers don’t you know. i don’t serve divorcees either so don’t feel bad – that would be not nice!

I really try not to believe in bad desires. Reason: 1) desires are not voluntary, and I try not to make people culpable for things that are beyond their voluntary control.

This is fine. But then this:

What I am saying is that, ceteris paribus, it is nice if desires can be fulfilled rather than frustrated.

which, note, is a point about the fulfillment of desires—i.e. about actions or outcomes for which actions are necessary—and not about the desires themselves. This, then, really needs to include moral permissibility as part of the ceteris paribus. And whatever may be true of Dreher in general (your (1) and (2)), he does have the desire of discriminating against a historically oppressed group that, if fulfilled, would require morally impermissible actions. So, it’s still not in any way “nice” if this desire of Dreher’s is fulfilled.

JH: “The fact that he wants to build his ideal community through violations of the rights of others means he forfeits all rights to build his community, even to wish to build it. ”

I wouldn’t say that he can forfeit his right to wish anything. People can wish whatever they want. For instance, I really wish that you would stop this basic confusion that you keep writing between actions and wishes.

But there is no way that his community could actually be built without harming others. What’s more, he realizes this, even though you don’t. He’s a player: you’re a patsy.

I can’t prove that he realizes this any more than you can prove that he doesn’t realize this. I can only point to his actions and writings — that’s what those links are about — and use them as evidence that he is someone who acts and writes as a knowing agent of discrimination, someone for whom part of the attraction of his ideal community is that it would be elevated on a hill built on the social downfall of other people.

“So I try to reserve the predicate ‘bad’ for actions.”

Yes but as you are not a mind reader with access to Dreher’s deepest thoughts I guess he must have acted on them and written them down for you to read and condense for us John Holbo

Dude writes a lot! And, as I said in the post, I have become kind of addicted to reading him.

I have too. I’ve long been fascinated by exposure to the thought’s of believers, and when you add in the turmoil—inconstancy of faith, familial alienation, personal health issues, apostasy of one tradition to embrace that of another, bouts of deep personal depression, the whole you can’t go home again truism he was impactfully forced to understand—that has been confessed by Dreher over the long years, it makes it all that much more compelling.

He also has developed a quite diverse community of commenters, and his political/cultural posts, particularly those on gay rights, ofttimes attract a large majority of argumentative traffic from liberal/progressive posters. The broad admixture of points of view in all categories is impressive, and it’s to Dreher’s credit that he continuously allows, even encourages, this spread in the face of semi-routine complaints from his core traditional followers and the sometimes harsh and dismissive volleys launched by those who oppose his expressed opinions and beliefs.

1. There will be NO community without gay people, they will just have to hide themselves, or go into deep self-denial. The real problem I see with all this blather is the effects of anti-gay commerce on little kids passing by: why won’t they let me in, Mommy? Children should NOT be made to doubt themselves on any account of race, creed, color or sex. Hetero children are TAUGHT that homo is bad; they don’t reason it themselves. Therefore commercial discrimination should be outlawed.

More likely to me is that we are headed into a near-future with so many new “ethical” questions — genetic re-editing, 3- and 4-parent babies, full-head transplants, flapping bio-wings attached to your back to let you fly in the sky like a cyborg angel — that soon, very soon indeed, homosexuality will be DEFENDED by religious fundamentalists as a simple traditional virtue from the days of yore…

Salem: “These are the kind of claims I don’t understand. They don’t seem to be predicated on any theory of harm”

Well, that’s one of the main things I’ve been writing in this thread — there is no abstract theory, of harm or otherwise, that can be used to clarify this in the case of the U.S. It’s all historically contingent.

But your intuition is wrong when you refer to commercial transactions as providing “easily replaceable commodities”. You seem to be thinking of discrimination as consisting only of the foibles of individuals. But it’s not: it’s really social. Once it becomes permissible, it’s easy for it to affect all businesses in a small town. After all, there are far more prejudiced people than there are minorities, so the businesses lose more business by not putting up a “no gays allowed” sign than they gain.

Salem: “It doesn’t seem based on any difference in the discriminator’s intent, either. ”

As I’ve also said a lot, intent isn’t observable. Even those laws that refer to intent really refer to behavior as a proxy for intent. But in fact anti-discrimination law involves some analysis of abstract business policies to see whether they really make sense, given what they are supposed to be for (i.e. given your claimed intent). For instance, a business policy banning head scarves but not other head coverings would be understood to be discriminatory against religion because it excludes members of a protected class for no reason that seems to apply to everyone.

You seem to be thinking of discrimination as consisting only of the foibles of individuals. But it’s not: it’s really social. Once it becomes permissible, it’s easy for it to affect all businesses in a small town. After all, there are far more prejudiced people than there are minorities, so the businesses lose more business by not putting up a “no gays allowed” sign than they gain.

I don’t recall saying that. I agree entirely that discrimination is social. But everything you say seems to support, not undermine, my point. If prejudice is so widespread that neutral businesses feel pressured to discriminate, then that same prejudice will shut the door to social engagements even more strongly, and it will soon affect all social engagements in a small town. Indeed, there was great pressure on the commercial aspects of Jim Crow, because businesses wanted to make money (e.g. East Louisiana Railroad were quite happy to sell Mr. Plessy a ticket). But there was not nearly the same pressure on the social side of Jim Crow. Indeed, to this very day there are plenty of golf clubs, country clubs, churches, etc, which are effectively whites-only. There are many parts of the US where a person facing discrimination may find themselves effectively shut out of huge areas of social engagement, and I regard this as a far greater harm than the commercial discrimination.

Now you’re right that if no-one will trade with you, that is a much more serious harm than one person refusing. But firstly, that doesn’t apply here; gay people do not have a general problem that no-one will cater their wedding. And secondly, if your point is that just in case that ever happens, commercial engagements must be open to all, then I’d ask why the same principle doesn’t apply to social relations. Just in case no-one will let me into their primitivist community, each primitivist community is obliged to accept me. And the obligation should be stronger on the community, because if you won’t sell me vegetables, vegetables from the next store are a good substitute, but the next community over is not a good substitute for the one in which I grew up in and holds all my social bonds.

The U.S. had these kinds of communities from the beginning, communities that fairly convincingly said that they had to be able to run their own internal affairs, within limits, according to their rules or they would lose what was distinctive about their community. Membership is generally understood to be the most important of these controls. These communities are tolerated because they genuinely are not trying to make their rules to apply to people outside the community, which is what distinguishes them from people like Dreher.

But it’s not at all clear that these communities shouldn’t lose some of their distinctiveness. To the extent that you believe that such communities aren’t trying to make their rules apply to people outside the community, that is equally true of commercial engagements – after all, the pizza parlour isn’t trying to prevent gays from getting married, they just won’t do the catering.

Now, there’s an extent to which the pizza parlour’s rules do apply to non-members – we won’t have commerce with you if you don’t meet our criteria. But that’s equally true for the religious community – we won’t socialise with you if you don’t meet our criteria. And the latter is far more devastating. Look, for example, at the Lost boys excluded from Mormon religious groups.

JH 362: “What I am saying is that, ceteris paribus, it is nice if desires can be fulfilled rather than frustrated. It is a rather trivial point. And it is truly the point I was making.”

I know what you were saying, and I said that your statement (if taken seriously and examined for its implications) is illogical.

Saalem: “But it’s not at all clear that these communities shouldn’t lose some of their distinctiveness. To the extent that you believe that such communities aren’t trying to make their rules apply to people outside the community, that is equally true of commercial engagements”

There’s a right of association, which necessarily implies a right of disassociation. People who go into retail commerce are considered to have disavowed this right with respect to their business and to have to go by the rules of larger society. That’s my best shot at explaining it in an abstract sense.

There’s a right of association, which necessarily implies a right of disassociation.

Agreed, but if rights of association are not unlimited, neither are rights of disassociation.

People who go into retail commerce are considered to have disavowed this right with respect to their business

So we’re right back to the absurd and indefensible “Jones loses his rights because he engages in commerce.” Is this anything more than prejudice against commercial transactions?

We have (in the US at least) laws protecting individuals within communities like the Amish. I don’t think they can hold gay people captive and refuse to allow them to leave, so they can be treated in the way the community thinks is correct. That’s still kidnapping, illegal imprisonment, etc. They have to have schools for certain age groups and the schools have to teach certain things. They generally have to teach English, though historically some groups have been allowed to teach in German and possibly Swedish. They have to obey child labor laws, though there are exceptions for farmers and family businesses.

All his doesn’t prevent two things: people who leave may not be prepared for life on the outside, and this effectively makes it very difficult for them to walk away, which can be a big problem in some communities, and people who don’t want to leave but do want to participate in new (not existent 100 years ago) opportunities like college or city life may find it difficult. It’s in some ways easier if you see yourself as a minority, like the Amish or a group that has always rejected “the world.” If you believe your minority religion requires you to be part of the majority culture, and can (like the business gospel) make you successful in the majority culture, and that you must be successful to obey your religion, you can run into problems.

There are ways to resolve the issue. You can say that the majority culture is different for the poor, and so the poor can be part of the majority culture by staying away from the institutions and people who wield power. You can go Aristotelian or something along those lines, and say there are lots of relevant subcultures.

Or you can go totalitarian and say your religion must be in charge. But then you don’t get to be a minority religion that dissents from the people in charge, I’d think (not unless you make super-subtle distinctions between law and society and state). And you have all the usual issues about how to describe dissenters who claim the mantle of the original anti-power religion.

But the people Dreher is talking about seem never to have thought of themselves as a minority religion. They got their special farming privileges and they became rich in business and were elected mayor and so on, without confronting he sense that religion was opposed to that. And now for some mysterious reason they’ve become aware of a conflict, and Dreher doesn’t seem to know whether he wants them to embrace totalitarianism, or embrace the idea that they can only be successful in their smaller community. But damn if he isn’t going to go all out arguing for both of them.

And–sorry, this was supposed to be in the other comment–the Catholic Church is in the US historically put off a similar moment of reckoning in working class communities by setting up parishes for immigrants on ethnic lines, so people didn’t have to integrate into a multiethnic society until some later date, if ever. But to a large extent, people who stay in, or near, the city can still feel like they’re living in an organic community (the opposite than for farm communities), as long as they can avoid certain snares.

“Is this anything more than prejudice against commercial transactions?”

Well, yes. I’d say that it has to do with how the liberal political order creates the capitalist order. Markets don’t just exist without states, or at any rate without some kind of enforcement mechanism which in contemporary societies is a state function. A large part of the function of the state is to set up state-wide rules for markets. In a sense the market is one of the centers of liberal society and it’s one of the places where general societal rules are most inescapable.

Shops are part of the public sphere, so all the public can be served in shops. Houses are private residences so usually they are not open to the general public unless someone is having an open house,

But this doesn’t seem like an answer to Salem’s question about why the law treats the entities this way. You can say “It’s MY house, so you can’t come in,” but you can’t say it’s MY store so you can’t come in.” If someone asks why that its, you can’t say “Because you have to allow people in your store but not your house,” because that’s just re-stating the question.

And Salem’s point was that one likely answer might be “You have to let them in your store because barring them from your store is more harmful that barring them from your house.” But then Salem presented evidence that it’s not at all clear that such is the case–it may be more harmful to keep people out of your house.

Sebastian H seems to agree that harm should be adopted as the measure; we should ban discrimination that keeps people from accessing essential services, but otherwise should allow discrimination. There seems to be considerable push back against this, although much of it has taken the form of trying to demonstrate there there’s considerable harm done when you deny non-essential services. Is it the case that people would be OK with making the measure of harm done the criteria for legal bans on discrimination if we were able to accurately calibrate the hurt that’s done by various forms?

@386: “… and also, I don’t want to live in a world where everyone’s bullshit gets argued out publicly.”

This is also one of the things that I find really annoying about the particular mechanism being proposed, here, for protecting wedding cake sellers. As I understand it, Dreher wants to defend the passing of religious freedom laws, phrased similarly to how they were phrased when they were intended to protect things like the use of peyote in religious rituals, but with a couple of tweaks to make it easier to propose applying them to discrimination cases, and with a bunch of accompanying hoopla about how they will now protect people who don’t want to provide cake or pizza to same-sex weddings. He defends these laws, while arguing that they won’t enable discrimination, apparently because courts will surely know, when cases are taken to them, to draw the line just where Dreher does (faith still can’t trump laws about discrimination by race, and, perhaps, whatever kind of discrimination by sexual orientation Dreher might consider sufficiently burdensome that an anti-discrimination law can reasonably be imposed, but definitely wedding services supplied for same-sex marriages should be exempted).

But the only way that we find out how courts apply these laws to discrimination cases is for lots of people to decide that they’d win a case in court, and therefore refuse services and say that it’s a faith-based decision, and for lots of other people to decide that they wouldn’t, and take them to court. And perhaps the end result is that no one gets to discriminate (after all, the religious freedom laws do still have the same old language about weighing exemptions against the government’s compelling interest in requiring something, and the government does have a compelling interest in anti-discrimination laws). Or perhaps the end result is that a lot more people get to discriminate than just wedding cake sellers (particularly if the judges involved turn out themselves to disapprove of same-sex marriage). Or maybe the boundary gets set precisely at wedding cakes. But either way, it only gets set when a lot of bullshit gets argued out in court at considerable expense.

Now, in the case of odds and ends like peyote use, or requirements about hair or beards or head coverings or what not, throwing the matter to courts may be necessary, since we can’t predict all the individual harmless requirements that particular faiths may have, that may bump up against government rules (and, even if we want to minimize government rules against harmless things, some people are in circumstances where they’re subject to government regulation above and beyond just the laws that apply to everyone).

But the conflict over wedding cakes is one that we can predict, and where we already know the relative weights of things (even if Dreher and I might not agree on what those relative weights are). We know what benefit is supplied by anti-discrimination laws, and we know what objections are raised. So any exemptions should be argued out explicitly in the legislature, where we can be clear about where the heck we want to draw the line, not thrown to the courts to draw the line where they will. Then, perhaps, a legislature in a state that doesn’t yet have anti-discrimination laws, as was the case in Utah, can, like Utah, add sexual orientation as a protected class for employment and residence but explicitly not make it a general protected class. Or, perhaps, in a law that otherwise makes sexual orientation a protected class altogether, we can allow exemptions for small scale creative services that can be seen as matters of free speech, which could cover photography and, I suppose, the decorations and writing on the cake (though it’s hard for me to see why refusing to sell the cake itself should deserve special protection). At any rate, whatever the final law passed, it would have to be clearer about who can get away with what than “you can discriminate if it’s required by your faith and if we don’t think the loss of this particular service is actually a problem,” which seems to be the alternative actually being proposed.

@399: “You can say “It’s MY house, so you can’t come in,” but you can’t say it’s MY store so you can’t come in.” If someone asks why that its, you can’t say “Because you have to allow people in your store but not your house,” because that’s just re-stating the question.”

Because harm A is being weighed against harm B. It may be that a given person thinks that the greatest harm of all is done if I refuse to have sex with him, but I am allowed to do so, even if my reasons for preferring sex with someone else to sex with him are obnoxious and bigoted, because in that case the harm of my being compelled to have sex with someone I don’t want to (for however obnoxious a reason) are so great that they outweigh any harm that could be done to him by losing me as a possible sex partner. Having someone in my house that I don’t want there is less intrusive than having someone in my body that I don’t want there, but still more intrusive than having someone in my shop that I don’t want there (after all, my house is a place where I’d normally only invite people I particularly like, for mutual pleasure, while my shop is a place where I’d normally invite the whole world, because it’s hard to make a living off only your particular friends). So the harm of my being required to have people I don’t want in my house is greater than the harm of having people I don’t want (not because of any misbehavior on their part but simply because I don’t like their kind of people) in my shop. Meanwhile, the harm of being excluded from public venues has been demonstrated to be great, for precisely the groups that are protected categories, because they have suffered from harm as a result of organized discrimination in the past. So their harm outweighs the harm suffered by the would be discriminatory shopkeeper.

“Won’t the police do the same for your private club or intentional community?”
Yes, they most certainly will, as I’m sure you know.

But those organizations are not established or recognized within the framework of commerce laws. While there are some exceptions, their responsibilities are established within the scope of not-for-profit/charitable organizations. I think that would be another thread entirely to discuss how the rules and responsibilities of not-for-profits should be considered since, by volume, the vast majority of these are political organizations.

faustusnotes, I got the impression that this wasn’t about less anti-discrimination law for businesses, but rather more anti-discrimination law for non-businesses. Although I could be wrong.

I can only repeat that there is no ahistorical way to disentangle this historical tangle, no way to implement a general solution even if found, and no way to settle on an abstract solution among the people here that includes the reason that we need a solution in the first place — namely, that some people want to discriminate in this way. It’s a liberal conceit to think that the person in one’s head is a fine substitute for the actual person, because after all if they thought reasonably they’d think just like a liberal. But some people really do think differently, they have political power and can’t be ignored, and they aren’t here.

parse,

ZM”Shops are part of the public sphere, so all the public can be served in shops. Houses are private residences so usually they are not open to the general public unless someone is having an open house,

parse: But this doesn’t seem like an answer to Salem’s question about why the law treats the entities this way. You can say “It’s MY house, so you can’t come in,” but you can’t say it’s MY store so you can’t come in.” If someone asks why that its, you can’t say “Because you have to allow people in your store but not your house,” because that’s just re-stating the question.”

I was just giving a descriptive answer. There are cultures that live in shared long houses so they do not have private residences just male/female+young, and other sorts of differences in other cultures.

I am not sure exactly how the public/private division of space developed in Europe, I have only read about this division of social space inthe 18-19th C because women were expected to stay in the private realm so that is why you have suffragettes

http://youtu.be/2vsrCZQlA0o

“What does that mean?”

I thought that Salem was concerned about the discrimination that non-business entities do, and wanted to prevent them from discriminating, rather than using their case as a pretext to argue that businesses should be allowed to discriminate more. But of course that argument could be used in either direction.

Sure, Salem, let’s basically destroy freedom of association, which if it doesn’t apply to membership doesn’t apply to anything, and in return substitute your personal intuition about what kind of discrimination is over or under inclusive, dressed up as abstract reasoning. That will work really well.

As philosophy, it’s shoddy. Who are you to decide what has no benefit or reasonable purpose? You evidently disagree with the couple who filed the lawsuit in the case you link to, which they certainly took trouble and time to pursue and for which they got attorney’s fees. I imagine that they thought that this had the reasonable purpose of not having another couple get a homophobic letter from a purported wedding photographer about how their wedding was wrong when they were happily planning their wedding. Anti-discrimination is social, of course, and is defined socially.

As politics, it’s weak. I’ve already explained why you have no chance of moving actuality in this direction. I have sympathy for patently implausible, abstract proclamations when they really are in the service of some utopian vision. But “a little more in column A, a little less in column B” isn’t one of them.

I’m not sure it’s a good principle, but commercial-discrimination-illegal–private-discrimination-legal is, at least, logically defensible. Everything you do has the potential to affect other people, but a commercial transaction is intrinsically about controlling something outside yourself, depending on some kind of communal agreement as to who owns what.

And, besides, whose head and inscription is on the coin?

That said, although it’s logically defensible I don’t think it’s the right answer. Lynn Gazis-Sax @403 has the right idea, I think, and contra parse it seems to be roughly represented under current law, which lets you discriminate in who you accept as your roommate even if money changes hands. We force Archie Bunker to work alongside black people, but not to live with them or pray beside them. It’s not crazy, though, to argue that we may have the balance somewhat wrong, and the photographer may possibly be an example of that.

Salem, I see your position as highly self-contradictory, and your example following that proves it. You complain about ‘forced association'[1] for commerce, and don’t like it, but do like ‘forced association’ for non-commercial situations.

And this follows an almost perfect trend on this matter; I don’t think that I’ve seen a single argument on this side which could not be and was not applied to racial and sexual discrimination.

Salem, I see your position as highly self-contradictory, and your example following that proves it. You complain about ‘forced association'[1] for commerce, and don’t like it, but do like ‘forced association’ for non-commercial situations.

No, I don’t like forced association in either case. But there are other things I like even less than forced association, so sometimes forced association is the least bad option. Sometimes, forced association may be necessary in commerce; if you’re the only doctor in the area, you should have to accept gay patients, no matter how bigoted you are. Violating the doctor’s freedom of association is still bad in this case, but denying the gay patients effective access to medicine is even worse. But equally, we shouldn’t jump to forced association. If there are a hundred doctors in the area, and 99 of them are happy to see the gay patient, there’s no reason to violate the bigoted doctor’s freedom of association. The question is – where does the harm lie? No-one can say with a straight face that Willock and Collinsworth suffered any cognisable harm from the Huguenins’ refusal to photograph their wedding, so why on earth should their freedom of association be abrogated.

The exact same analysis applies to a non-commercial situation. Freedom of association is extremely valuable, but it can be overridden to prevent greater harms. However, as I have pointed out several times, the harms from discrimination in non-commercial situations are normally greater than the harms from discrimination in commercial situations. Therefore the balance will normally favour more non-discrimination measures in non-commercial settings, but not because non-commercial settings are qualitatively different from commercial settings.

However, as I have pointed out several times, the harms from discrimination in non-commercial situations are normally greater than the harms from discrimination in commercial situations.

This is insane. It means that one makes discrimination less harmful by attaching commerce to it. Just because you assert something multiple times doesn’t mean it makes any sense.

Some noncommercial discrimination is more harmful than some commercial discrimination. And vice versa. Harm to the discriminated against is not the only thing we consider when regulating discrimination. If it were, why stop at regulating associations? Why not ban hateful speech and religions?

“The exact same analysis applies to a non-commercial situation. Freedom of association is extremely valuable, but it can be overridden to prevent greater harms. ”

I think Rich Puchalsky is right and you are being contradictory unless you want to transform the private/public separation to them both being the same .

Even if you do want this transformation how would it work in practice? Shopkeepers can say” you heathen you have violated my religious beliefs so I will not sell you bread”? But then passers by can see a tea party going on and knock to go in and the host cannot refuse them due to not having any religious reasons to object?

Further, local government programs for social inclusion usually have activities in public places, not in private residences.

I sort of get it, in that there are some matters of private association, like insular religious communities shunning any individual that questions the local orthodoxy, that are truly terrible–essentially, people are forced into submission by the threat of being cut off from everyone they know.

It’s heartbreaking. I can understand looking at that and saying “there outta be a law!”. I just don’t know what that law could be.

Sebastian H that doesn’t answer my question. I don’t care about the particular legislative reasons why one dumb law is replacing another one. I want to know why religious people are especially allowed to refuse to offer any category of service, while simply bigoted people are not. The USA is a religious oligarchy, not a democracy.