In a really free society, a person should be able to serve whatever product they want to whomever they want, and not provide that service to anyone they choose.
Doesn’t mean there won’t be consequences to those choices (boycotts, pickets, etc.), but having the government force its choices at the point of a gun is the wrong answer. If the government selects your choices today, a new government can use that same power to select different choices tomorrow - sound familiar?
I don’t agree with this. It sounds “correct”, and would be a preferred situation if the vast majority of people were decent.
But I believe the government does have a responsibility to protect the lives and property of the people. If people were allowed to refuse service to people based on non-germane characteristics, the live, liberty, and property of a class of citizens could be jeopardized. This of course is how we ended up with such laws to begin with.
I’d really like to say “we don’t need civil rights laws, and shouldn’t have them”. But imagine a town were everybody refused to sell a house to a black person. Can we argue that all citizens should have the right to live in a place of their choosing, or should a community be able to forbid a class of people from living among them?
What if no grocery stores would sell food to Christians, no farmer would allow Christians to come pick food, nobody would sell them seeds, or farming equipment. Suppose nobody would sell them water, or clothing.
It is hard to say this couldn’t happen — it is precisely the problem blacks faced in some towns prior to the civil rights movement. And while I believe that we could have used social stigmatism to overcome this, and that would have been preferable to the civil rights laws, I believe government has an interest in ensuring that people can buy food, and pick shelter where they desire.
Sadly, it is the confrontational era we live in that causes the trouble here. Because in the past, people wouldn’t go shop where they weren’t wanted, even if they had the “right” to do so. But now we have gays ignoring gay businesses so they can attack Christians.
I would prefer if government involved itself only when there was an institutional issue — like if a town clearly had encouraged a situation where NO business would serve someone. If the non-service businesses are outliers, the government should let them be.
So really, I would prefer not having laws that require service, but I think they are a rational and legal response to an institutional issue, if one exists.