[M]any liberals stand by the ACLU’s faulty reasoning that businesses open to the public must serve everyone – it’s not “personal” property anymore. Faulty because it implies that, once you start selling a product or service, you automatically lose your right to freely and voluntarily interact with other people. It’s opened to the public, so it suddenly becomes public “property” and the business owner loses any say in who he or she does business with.
So anti-discrimination laws applied to the private sector violate individual rights, in this case rights to freedom of association and contract.
But Veer doesn’t stop there. He shows that legalizing discrimination is a very effective anti-discrimination tool:
So instead of having government force businesses to serve anyone, I want it to let them discriminate in the open. This way, I know exactly where not to do business.
With bigots exposed by their own actions, opponents can peacefully (non-coercively) fight back, for example, with boycotts. Veer cites several examples of successful boycotts.
And this is the crux of the matter. Freedom works both ways. The only sure way to weed bad behavior (or bad ideas like so-called “hate speech”) out of the culture is to leave bad actors free to broadcast their beliefs, and then defeat or marginalize them in the open air of freedom. Legal bans only end up driving it underground, allowing it to metastasize without scrutiny. Even if a boycott is unsuccessful at bankrupting or getting a business to change its behavior, each of us is free not to patronize the business. That is the civil way for people to deal with their differences.
Worse, legal bans threaten the freedom of all of us, by putting government in charge of dictating who we may associate with and what ideas we are allowed to express--a sure road to tyranny.
If you value freedom, you must be prepared to stand up for the rights of people who engage in unsavory behavior. This article makes a good case for why this truth is so. Read I Don't Want Anyone Forced to Bake Me a Cake by Pierre-Guy Veer and heed his advice.
Related Reading:
Private Sector Anti-Discrimination Laws are Rights-Violating and Destructive
How to Overcome Bigotry in a Free Society
Does rescinding laws banning private discrimination make a moral statement in support of bigotry?
Freedom, not Laws, is the Answer to Defeating Bigotry
Fighting Anti-Private Discrimination Laws: The Role of Principles in the Fight for Freedom
There is No ‘Right to Equal Treatment’; Only the Right to ‘Equal Protection of the Law’
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