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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Not a constitutional scholar (I am a lawyer but just not familiar enough with the law here to weigh in on that) but I do have an opinion on this from a broader, non legal perspective.

I personally think it *should* be legal for small business that is offering a non-essential service to discriminate by race, sex, sexual orientation, etc.. Not because I think racism is great, but because ultimately people should be allowed to choose who they spend their time with. I am a woman. If some man was like "I want to sell beer but only to men," I would think that was dumb and sexist but also wouldn't care that much because I wouldn't want to patronize a business owned by someone who hated women that much. Since beer is not essential and likely sold other places anyway, I just wouldn't care. You do you, dummy.

I thought this for the gay marriage/baker case too. I get that of course it would feel bad to be told that the baker you had tried to hire didn't agree with your marriage or your sexual orientation. But would it feel better if the baker who hates you because your gay made the cake for your wedding? I would want everyone I hired for my wedding to be tolerant of the marriage itself, simply due to not wanting bad vibes. Rather than try to force the bakery to make my cake, I'd find another solution.

So based purely on my personal opinion and not grounded in any legal argument, I think it's fine for a crafting store to decide to offer a class just for people of certain races. I might be annoyed if it's a class that sounded interesting to me but I wasn't of the right race, but I also wouldn't want to attend a class where everyone there wanted to be around people of the same race and I was another race because I don't like feeling unwelcome in that way. So forcing them to invite me seems counterproductive.[/quote]

Imagine holding this view in the 50's or 60's when a lot of unjustly accumulated wealth, power and prestige were concentrated and passed down within certain overtly exclusionary demographics. What do you think that does for social mobility? For equal opportunity?

A country club is not essential. Nor is a restaurant. Or a social club etc. But you would be fooling yourself if you said these things weren't a big part of the mechanisms by which social, political and financial power are accumulated and passed along.[/quote]

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