Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Right to Refuse Service... and Arizona

There is a confusion.  Refusal of services and refusals of the ACA on moral grounds are two different issues.

The law being considered in Arizona would allow people for reasons of conviction (some being religious) not to do business with people or groups that they choose not to.

This is not about race, creed or color.  I'm with that all the way.

This is about someone who is cross currant with what you stand for as an individual.  If I owned a nice formal book store and a person came in with a F... YOU tee shirt on, I would ask him to leave.  It is cross currant. 

If I were a Pastor of a church and someone presented themselves at the altar for communion and was wearing a tee shirt with a graphic set of male genitals prominently displayed, I would not serve them.

If a group of swingers, now euphemistically called polyamorous groups, came to my banquet hall and I am a culturally moral person and asked to rent it to hold an orgy, do I have the right to refuse?  Worse if I am that Pastor and they want to rent my basement for such...Where is the line?

What if I owned a bakery, and someone came in to order an obscene cake made, one with the illustration of a sodomy sex act.  Not illegal among consenting adults, but I don't want that on my shelf.

Of course as someone said, there was always the Soup Nazi..no soup for you. That was funny, but it was based on if he did or did not like you... in Seinfeld.

I have people I don't do business with who I don't like.  Tree Nazi I guess.  They are unpleasant and hard to get along with, so they go away.  I have that right.  I can say no.  I am not forced to make any transaction in life with anyone who I don't want to.  That seems to be the free in free enterprise.  I have customers who's lifestyle I may disagree with, one very prominent in Chicago where she and her wife had a child and I got a birth announcement in the mail.  Yet we get along great.  She always recognizes me.  She doesn't come to me with entitlement, but with honor.

I think based on these thoughts there are times when someone may attempt to cause you to do something that goes against your grain and you decide not to because you don't want to endorse such.  I have a customer in WI (Milwaukee area) who is a drug dealer and a pimp.  He uses a garden center as a front.  It works well for him.  I won't report him, but Mike calls me every year and tries to buy from me.  I don't have any "Soup" for him. I won't reinforce his behavior.

There is such a place and we can't be asked to abandon our held beliefs, religious or not. 

This is different by a wide margin than the person who is a Christian and who's convictions does not allow him to pay for abortion inducing drugs for his employees as is required by the ACA.  It's akin to the Chariots of Fire movie - not running on Sunday, or Hank Greenburg sitting out a game on Yom Kippur.  Decisions of convictions are critical to carve out a just society.  Rosa Parks wouldn't move to the back of the bus.  Conviction.  So if I own a business and choose to not buy into supplying abortion to my employees, I have that right, but before you put me out of business I also have a right and a responsibility to fight the fight... see Brown v Board of Education. 

That's my position on the matter.  Sometimes you have to take a stand...I hope the Governor will but i have doubts

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