Legalizing Discrimination

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Backlash builds over Indiana’s religious freedom law (cbsnews.com)
Religious Freedom Firestorm: Arkansas House Approves Bill Similar to Indiana’s (nbcnews.com)

Ever since the first major fight over a “religious liberty” bill in Arizona just over a year ago, I’ve been keeping a very close eye on this topic. (Ohio was considering a similar measure to Arizona’s at around the same time, but pulled it when Arizona’s bill triggered a national firestorm.) I had hoped that last year’s controversy would stop all similar ideas dead in their tracks, but after Republicans had such a strong performance in the 2014 midterms, there really was no telling what crazy things Republicans from coast to coast would do, from suggesting a law that all Americans be required to attend church weekly (“the church of their choice” but it has to be on Sunday, natch) to blocking a bill by fourth graders to name an official state raptor in New Hampshire because of abortion. Perhaps, like the post-2010 Republican fuckery that has left Wisconsin and Michigan all but dead, we should have expected “religious liberty” bills to be back on the docket.

Although this issue has been going on for a while now, particularly in pharmacies (where some pharmacists over the years have refused to fill prescriptions for birth control pills and the like because of their religious beliefs), it’s picked up in recent years as more and more states have legalized same-sex marriages. It’s usually companies that handle weddings — photographers, bakers and the like — that are at the forefront of these debates, because of the owners’ beliefs about same-sex marriage and how those should be allowed to affect how they conduct their business. In a vacuum, this could lead to a very interesting debate about the interaction between markets and governments.

Unfortunately we don’t live in a vacuum, but in a country that is rapidly being driven to the depths of stupidity by the most despicable of right-wing misanthropes. Last year’s Supreme Court ruling that corporations could line-item veto laws that conflicted with the corporations’ “religious beliefs” advanced the ludicrous idea of “corporate personhood” even further. Allowing corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns, under the grotesquely insane ideas that “corporations are people” and “money is speech,” may well lead to the effectual eradication of American democracy within a generation. Saying that companies can now have religious beliefs, and act on them, defies reason, and so I believe it’s in the government’s best interest to proactively assert the rights of individual citizens against discrimination at the hands of corporations, particularly in an age where corporations are granted more and more powers (and yet simultaneously relieved of more and more responsibilities).

When it comes down to it, all these “religious freedom” or “religious liberty” bills are designed to do is throw cover on people discriminating against those they don’t like under the guise of corporate rights. As usual when talking about these things, the only religion these people want to receive “freedom” or “liberty” is their perverted notion of Christianity; if a Muslim-run business were, for whatever reason, to use one of these laws to refuse service to Christian customers, right-wing media would be in breathless coverage of this “domestic terrorism” for weeks. (Remember, if you’re white and you crash a plane and kill 150 people, you’re just a person with mental issues who committed suicide.) Let’s not kid ourselves that this is anything more than an attempt to legalize abhorrent behaviours by a cadre of religious right-wingers.

Those of us on the left all too often get mislabeled by our opponents as “thought police” or some similar term. To be clear, what goes on in your head, and in your heart, is your business and yours alone. If you want to hate someone because of their sexual orientation, or their gender identity, or the colour of the skin, or their religion, or just what sports teams they like, that is up to you. Personally, I don’t think that’s a very good or constructive way to go about your life, but that’s just my opinion and you’re perfectly entitled to think I’m completely full of crap. If you don’t want to respect anyone, for whatever reason, that is entirely up to you.

Here’s the thing, though: There is a world of difference between respecting someone on one hand, and treating them with respect on the other. You may not like someone walking down the street opposite you for any reason, but that’s doesn’t entitle you to go and punch them in the face. If we were to allow something like that, society as we know it would almost instantaneously disappear, replaced with a kill-or-be-killed anarchy that might make for a good premise for a dystopian young adult novel, but in reality would be hell on earth. People you don’t like still have the same right to live in as much safety and security as you do, and without that bedrock concept underlying the most basic of social interactions, there would be no society. Period.

This is why our governments have laws enforcing these most basic of human interactions, and why we generally don’t try to repeal these laws through our legislative avenues. (Not that some don’t try, though, like that guy in California who’s trying to make it legal for Californians to kill homosexuals just for being homosexual.) As fewer and fewer Americans ascribe to the old tropes of non-heterosexuals and non-cisgender people being dangerous sexual predators and what have you, it’s clear that attempts to use the government to discriminate against those people are bound to fail. With the Supreme Court apparently likely to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide later this year, cultural conservatives are already trying to stir up new fights that they think they have a better chance of winning, whether it’s working to legislate against homosexuality in other countries or trying to pass discriminatory laws about transgender people’s bathroom use.

The other tactic conservatives are trying to use to this end is a familiar one of theirs: Building up corporate “rights” to the point to render elected government essentially ineffectual. It’s no surprise that when Indiana’s Governor Mike Pence was grilled by George Stephanopoulos on This Week about the real purpose of the legislation, the results were almost identical to Rachel Maddow’s legendary skewering of Rand Paul on his opposition to the Civil Rights Act. Both Pence and Paul knew they’d sound like complete assholes if they actually tried to defend their positions, so they went to such tortured lengths to dodge basic questions that they came off as both assholes and fools. In both cases, the conservatives fell back on the tired defence of how they, personally, would not patronize any business that discriminated against people, but that they don’t think it’s the government’s role to tell business what to do. This goes back on that old “humanitarian libertarianism” idea that discrimination in the market creates opportunities for other businesses to serve those being discriminated against, but that assumes that there isn’t a strong cultural and governmental effort to create and maintain a permanent underclass of people, and everything from laws to prevent private citizens from feeding homeless people to the raft of legislation coast-to-coast to stop minorities from voting shows that conservatives are actively maintaining this underclass, even if it hurts the market by removing actors from it, just because they can make more money by maintaining their old bogeymen (African-Americans, homosexuals and so on) to scare people with through their media networks.

This right-wing pablum that businesses will do what is best for everyone “out of the goodness of their hearts” is a flat-out lie because companies are not people. They don’t have hearts, or consciences, or anything else that human beings have. In an atmosphere as morally toxic as America’s, where thirty-five years of Reaganism has inculcated this idea that one person’s ability to make a profit on something overrules any other ideas of fairness or equality or basic human decency, this means that a shocking percentage of Americans will defend any company’s right to do whatever they want, no matter how it hurts, or even kills, other Americans, to say nothing of the environment or other concerns. Without a correcting force to stop the excesses of the capitalist market, we’re going to wind up in a scenario little better than the anarchy described above.

Government is supposed to be that correcting force, the people who make sure that bad companies, like bad people, don’t hurt other people. You don’t even have to choose between a strong business sector and a strong government, because it can be possible for both to exist. Where the ideal balance between the two is can be a tricky idea to figure out, but if corporations are already allowed to spend limitless amounts of money to elect politicians into office who will let them run roughshod over the country (and the world), then doesn’t the government need a corresponding power to reign in corporations and make sure they don’t effectively supplant democratic government?

Unless these “religious freedom” bills get flushed down the toilet, we’re destined to regress back to the years of “Whites Only” signs in business windows, except now they’ll say “Straights Only.” Sixty years ago we knew that wasn’t right, and we know it’s not right today. The only people looking to pass these laws are people who want the government to wink and turn a blind eye to their own discrimination and other abhorrent behaviours. If we’re going to turn back the clock on that basic idea, how much further will conservatives try to go to undo civil rights or even more?

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