Should businesses be allowed to deny fat/ugly people?

why should anyone give a flying eff what the bible (or any bs religious text of that sort) has to say about something that's nothing more than a personal choice? Are you aware that the fiercest warriors ever seen (Spartans) had many gay men in their ranks? Those "limpwristers" could rip off your head with one hand, while drinking from a winecup with the other hand, and not spill any.

 

You are materially aiding their survival and thus continued ability to do crime.

Sort of like if you sold a murderer a gun.

 

actually it has nothing to do with money. it's entirely about your look. clubs want to market to particular crowds, so they refuse entry to people who look out of place - no matter how rich that person is or looks. someone with no money at all can be far hipper than a millionaire. perhaps you've been denied entry to a hip club and decided it was about money to save feeling like a redneck?

 

anyone can. since only a miniscule proportion of obese people get huge as a result of a medical condition, we have about a 99.9% chance of being right when calling it 'gluttony'. Or gluttony and lack of exercise.

 

I'm a tiny minority? I'm a heterosexual, dufus. And lots of us support the rights of homosexuals. Unlike you spiteful morons, we don't have a problem with people loving each other. What consenting adults do is their business and no one else's. And you may call yourself a Christian and express your hatred of homosexuals in the same breath, and I just laugh and say you aren't a Christian. Your a hypocritical bigot. Nothing more.

 

Unless I force you in a gay orgy, next to the mixer, I am not. Not a single word in that Bible prohibits or demands baking a cake for a gay couple. You are making it up out of thin air

 

. Nobody is using your floral arrangement or your cake in their gay orgy. It is not a crime to get married and you can't even find a word in that Bible that suggests gays should or should not marry, let alone one that shows that you are required or encouraged to discriminate against gay people or their marriage as an exercise of your faith. You are only proscribed from having gay sex yourself.

 

The depth of the xenophobia in this country is breathtaking. One would have thought we would have overcome such bigotry by now. It really is a kind of a curse, not only on the current adult population, but on our children as well.

 

My position on the ability of individuals to refuse service has nothing to do with religion. I'm an Atheist, I feel people should be able to refuse service to anyone for any reason.

 

1. There is no constitutionally protected right to associate or right to refuse to associate when you run or operate a business according to SCOTUS. It is different from private clubs like the Lions club or the boy scouts or your bowling league as opposed to restaurants or hotels or bakeries that put that open to the public notice on their door and get a business license

. 2. The black baker is refusing to bake that cake because of a political identification of a customer, which is legal everywhere that I know, as opposed to race, gender, disability, orientation( some states) or gender. The KKK is not a protected class anymore than the democratic party is. The baker can refuse service to someone who has an 'Obama for President' pin on his lapel or a pro-life bumper sticker on his car too.

Whether we want to include political or ideological identification as protected status is another question for state/ federal legislators who write civil rights laws. I'd be interested in reading the wording of such a statutory revision though. Courts are interpreting legislative statutes, not the constitution except insofar as they have consistently held that the reach of the Civil Rights Act is constitutional and that government can regulate commerce, and ban discriminatory treatment in housing, employment and service. The constitution does not REQUIRE governments to regulate these commercial practices either. Nothing unconstitutional about repealing the civil rights acts in their entirety and allowing blanket racial segregation in the South in private enterprise.

This is not the same issue as those marriage licenses which fall under the purview of the 14th due process clause because government is the one issuing as opposed to some marriage license shop in the mall or a club or a church.

 

Surely, immediate poor, threatening, or rude behaviour is the only sensible reason to refuse service. What colour underpants someone wears (or any other equally irrelevant 'reason') has no bearing on a transaction.

I'd be interested to know what people who (want to) refuse service to gay people think they will gain by doing so. Are they trying to impress yahweh? Are they invested in making life harder for certain people? Are they power tripping?

 

This law doesn't force beliefs onto anyone, nor does it keep anyone from getting everything they want in life.
Except maybe free birth control coverage.

Agreed.
And no one is forced to shop at a Christian-owned business, buy from Christians, or do anything else for Christians.
Now, they are free from having to provide for Christians also.



Why are people so angry and threatened over some silly law, when 99.9% of Christians treat gays just like anyone else ?

 

If a business owner knows the color of your underwear, that would be your doing.... and he has a right to kick you out.

Like your sexual preference.... it's only known when you choose to make it known.

.

That's a very, very, very minute group of citizens...but you'd have to ask them. And good luck finding one.



As you know, all this outrage is over an issue that was never in danger of happening in the first place.

 

In that case, you need to take it up with Congress and state legislators who passed those civil rights laws, and the federal courts including SCOTUS who has ruled that such regulation falls within the scope and purview of the commerce clause. The marketplace pressures just did not work well in Missouri or Louisiana to break the back of racial segregation requiring a legislative response.

Personally, I think you don't have a right or entitlement to own or run a business and if you can't serve gays, blacks, men, women, the disabled, or Jews in such a way as to promote the public good and general welfare, you should not be allowed to run your business at all. For the most part, if the community does not get what it deems a social benefit from the existence of a private for-profit business, that enterprise need not exist. I also feel if you can't or won't pay minimum wage and overtime, put a fire extinguisher on your wall, or keep a warning label on your chemicals, you should not be in business either.

 

Name me the scripture where lack of exercise is a sin? All the Bible says about gluttony is it will lead to poverty.

 

As interpreted, the commerce clause can authorize quite literally any Federal intervention. In any area. On any basis.

Damn right, you work for the state. You have no function but to advance the interests of the state. Currently, jobs and wealth looks good for the state, therefore - you can be permitted to "own" some property yourself, but we reserve the right to restrict this in any way we see fit and take it away entirely at a later date.

What a joke. If that's freedom, sign me up for fascism.

 

You are absolutely correct. "What consenting adults do is their business and no one else's." UNTIL they decide to force me to go against my faith in doing so. If gays come into my bakery and want to buy a dozen cup cakes, I will gladly sell it to them. If they ask for a blank wedding cake, I will gladly sell them one. If they ask me to decorate a a gay wedding cake that reflects that, I will gladly tell them to go elsewhere to get that done. It's my business and no one has to shop there. With that in mind, if I made a gay wedding cake, I would likely lose much more business with my Christian customers for supporting a specific sin in the Bible. No one has the right to force that on myself or my business. You don't seem to understand it's a matter of extension. If I sold cell phones, it simply wouldn't matter who they were sold to, you got the money.....you got the phone. The customer being gay extends nothing onto me, a baker being forced to decorate a gay wedding cake does.

With regards to your statement: " you may call yourself a Christian and express your hatred of homosexuals in the same breath", I hereby challenge you to post where I ever expressed "HATRED" toward gays. That in of itself would be a sin. That's what I love about secular's like you, Theology is a whole field of college study yet you know so much about it that you can pontificate who is a Christian and who is not. It really is laughable. It appears in your world view there is no room for anyone's beliefs but yours. Considering the above, your vitriol toward me is simply sad and quite intolerant. The tolerance you expect me to show toward others that don't agree with me. That is the basis I will consider YOU the hypocrite.

 

"There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus".

 

Romans 1:26-28 - 26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion. 28 Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done.

 

Well as an example if you publicly discriminated against person's of color you might actually gain significant business from racists. I don't know this would happen but it is hypothetically possible.

 

So God basically let them alone which should provide a good role model for all Christians.

 

You're missing the point. They can be left alone till they want to draw ME into their sinning. That's where the line is.

 

A christian baker would just as likely deny wedding cake service to two heterosexual men who wished to marry. Has nothing to do with being gay.
Freedom of religion is a part of the US Constitution. These rights to be served by a business are the creation of statutes that could be eliminated by a vote of the legislature. Absurd to elevate these statutes above the US Constitution

 

Leaving them alone would likely involve not baking their wedding cake for them.

 

I should probably start this response with a question.

Do you think that every SCOTUS ruling has been correct - and Constitutional? I can tell you my opinion, of course, but you can already guess. SCOTUS has been a political - not a judicial - body for decades now.

Your first response was a prime example of that to me. It was arbitrarily - and incorrectly - 'ruled'. By liberals. That doesn't make it correct, and - in fact - I'd like to see which ruling in particular you're leaning on for your stance, so that we can read the dissent(s).

Do you realize the murky thick nasty water you're wading into now? Do you want me to revise the analogy to merely someone who acts like a 'cracker' who orders a lynching cake in order to expose the ridiculousness of the mental gymnastics required in order to categorize a supposedly 'legitimate' discrimination of a customer?

This is a gopher-hole with no end.

...and you bely the point here. If there is nothing unConstitutional about abolishing laws against racial discrimination, then there is no Constitutional basis for preventing any form of business (or personal) discrimination.

And - IMO - there shouldn't be, short of committing a crime (injury or otherwise) due to discriminatory motive.

Government shouldn't issue those either. Marriage should not be something in which the Government has its fingers.