Consider this ACLU press release from a few months ago:
The American Civil Liberties Union of Washington today announced an agreement settling a discrimination complaint filed by a gay man against a local business that refused to print invitations to his wedding with his same-sex partner. Under the agreement, the business owner has apologized for her actions and agreed to abide by Seattle’s anti-discrimination law in the future.
“Our nation’s commitment to ending discrimination requires businesses to serve all customers equally,” said ACLU of Washington staff attorney Aaron Caplan, who represented the gay man in the case. “Business owners are entitled to their private opinions about same-sex marriage, but discriminatory business practices are not permitted.”
In August 2003, Seattle resident Tom Butts contacted Starfish Creative Invitations to hire them to print invitations for his upcoming wedding ceremony with Scott Carter in Vancouver, British Columbia. Butts liked samples of the company’s work he had seen and liked the fact that it was a local business. But Starfish, a Seattle company, refused to provide their services because, in the proprietor’s words, she believes “homosexuality is wrong” and same-sex weddings are “against her belief system.”
The business owner’s refusal violated Seattle’s Open Housing Public Accommodations Ordinance, which protects an individual’s right to purchase products and services without regard to sexual orientation. With legal representation by the ACLU, Butts filed a complaint with Seattle’s Office for Civil Rights, the agency that enforces the non-discrimination law.
Under the settlement announced today, the business owner acknowledged that all persons should be treated with respect and dignity, regardless of sexual orientation, and she apologized that her actions offended and hurt Butts. She agreed not to violate Seattle’s anti-discrimination law in the future. Butts and Carter were married in October 2003.
(Thanks to Justin Katz for the pointer.)
One common argument — perhaps the most common argument — in various gay rights debates is “How do equal rights for gays hurt you?” We hear it repeatedly in the gay marriage debate; we hear even more of it in the debate about decriminalization of same-sex sexual conduct.
The argument has a great deal of merit as a general approach to looking at things. It’s not the only question, since especially when it comes to government-provided benefits, one important question should be how the extension of benefits helps society, and it’s not an unanswerable question. But it is an important question. Part of the pro-gay-marriage-rights side’s recent relative success flows from the difficulties that the other side has had in articulating a concrete and persuasive explanation of how gay marriage rights would hurt the rest of us.
But as the ACLU press release shows, the gay rights movement has affected others, by legally restraining their freedom of choice. The woman whom the ACLU went after has been essentially legally coerced into helping put together an event that she finds morally repugnant. Whether or not we agree with her, I think we must acknowledge that this is a significant loss of freedom for her — just as it would be a loss of freedom to force an ethical vegetarian building contractor to help build a meatpacking plant, to force a militant Democrat printer to print Republican flyers, or to force a pacifist mechanic to help repair tanks that are on their way to the battlefield.
Of course, this freedom has been restricted in some measure by other antidiscrimination laws; and I do not claim that this freedom is generally constitutionally protected (though some aspects of it might be protected under some state constitutional religious freedom guarantees). But this doesn’t make the remaining freedom any less important to people, as the examples in the preceding paragraph show. Our business lives and our property rights are regulated in all sorts of ways. But we still have reason to complain about new regulations, and to reject claims that some law is harmless to us when the law actually constrains our freedom of choice.
Now this restriction on freedom of choice is not a logically necessary consequence of, say, the decriminalization of homosexual sex, or even of the recognition of same-sex marriages (recall that this happened in Washington State, where same-sex marriages aren’t legally recognized). One can imagine a libertarian regime in which gays enjoy freedom from government interference with their liberty, and enjoy equal access to government benefits, but those who disapprove of homosexuality enjoy equal freedom not to help with practices and rituals that they find abhorrent. But that doesn’t seem to be how our legal system works these days. Greater legal acceptance of homosexuals’ freedom from government intrusion and government discrimination has indeed been accompanied with greater constraints on private choices not to deal with homosexuals. There are many reasons for this (chiefly attitude-altering slippery slopes and multi-peaked preferences slippery slopes, under which some voters take the view that once certain sorts of behavior are recognized as legitimate they generally shouldn’t form the basis of private discrimination as well as public discrimination, and also perhaps in some measure political momentum slippery slopes and political power slippery slopes); but whatever the reason, it does appear to be the case.
This having been said, I still on balance support government recognition of same-sex marriage, and I strongly support having same-sex sexual conduct be legal. I realize that such action will probably increase the likelihood of bans on private sexual orientation discrimination, but though I oppose such bans, I think that on balance the benefits of recognizing same-sex marriage and decriminalizing same-sex sexual conduct exceed the costs.
But I quite understand why people who morally disapprove of homosexuality fear that the gay rights movement will mean not just more liberty for homosexuals, but less liberty for those who disapprove of homosexuality.
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