Skip to main content

Because the government can tell two women and their children that they are not a family ...

... is why it is not always a good idea to rely completely on the State to safeguard your civil liberties.

From Classically Liberal:

Lava Hot Springs Park [Idaho] is a government-owned “recreation” center that announced a family discount. It then told a lesbian couple and their children that they don’t count as a real family and won’t get the discount. The park used state marriage laws as the excuse for that. When they got some flack over the unequal policy they announced that they would solve it by stripping all families of discounts. You should note that they are doing this over a few dollars....

What the local Chamber of Commerce said was that they were asked about their views toward “gay and lesbian visitors” and that the Board of the Chamber unanimously agreed that “we want all to know that we hope this isolated incident won’t dissuade visitors from exploring our community and, indeed, the rest of Idaho. The Lave Hot Springs Chamber of Commerce feels that all are welcome in our community and we look forward to showing them our Idaho hospitality.”

On one hand we have a government-owned park making a same-sex couple and their children feel especially unwelcome while the Chamber of Commerce, that represents 70 businesses in the area, is going out of its way to tell people that they welcome everyone as visitors in their community. I am not the least bit surprised by this.


He follows with a theoretical digression into markets as better protectors of civil liberties than governments, concluding:

In Lava Hot Springs the local businesses don’t want to alienate customers. They want to welcome everyone. The non-profit, state-controlled park doesn’t have to satisfy customers. It doesn’t exist purely on the basis of profit. They have no major incentive to treat people right. They can afford to be legalistic, bureaucratic and stodgy. They can ignore the realities of life since they are government controlled and owned and they don’t have to make a profit. They can treat people like shit, businesses can’t.

What I have never understood is why so many progressives and advocates of diversity believe that state control will make life better for those who suffer discrimination. It isn’t the private community that is refusing to recognize gay couples—it is the state. Only six states have recognized gay marriage. Hundreds of the largest corporations in the United States recognized those relationship years ago. Even when a radical progressive like Barack Obama gets into office he’s happy to screw the gay community around for months, refusing to keep his promises. What Obama won’t do, private businesses have done quietly and with little conflict for years.


I am not agreeing that everything would be all right if all civil liberties protections were market-based, not Constitution-based.

But this does make a strong argument that, especially within the so-called grey areas, trusting the State to interpret those issues is not necessarily a wise decision.

Comments

Miko said…
Also, market-based solutions allow incremental improvements. One business/non-profit org./etc. can change its policies without having to wait for everyone else to catch up. On the other hand, a city that wants to legalize same-sex marriage has to wait for the state its located in, which in turn has to wait (to some extent) for the U.S. to repeal DOMA. Centralization naturally tends to lead to conservatism.

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?