What Are Your Rights?

by Simon 121 Replies latest jw friends

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  RULES & REGULATIONS

  Jeff T

  Do Restaurants Have the Unrestricted Right to Refuse Service?

  No. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 explicitly prohibits restaurants from refusing service to patrons on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. In addition, most courts don’t allow restaurants to refuse service to patrons based on extremely arbitrary conditions. For example, a person likely can’t be refused service due to having a lazy eye.

  But Aren’t Restaurants Considered Private Property?

  Yes, however they are also considered places of public accommodation. In other words, the primary purpose of a restaurant is to sell food to the general public, which necessarily requires susceptibility to equal protection laws. Therefore, a restaurant’s existence as private property does not excuse an unjustified refusal of service. This can be contrasted to a nightclub, which usually caters itself to a specific group of clientele based on age and social status.

  So Are "Right to Refuse Service to Anyone" Signs in Restaurants Legal?

  Yes, however they still do not give a restaurant the power to refuse service on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. These signs also do not preclude a court from finding other arbitrary refusals of service to be discriminatory. Simply put, restaurants that carry a "Right to Refuse Service" sign are subject to the same laws as restaurants without one.
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  JeffT

  What's the difference between me wanting steak from a restaurant that doesn't serve it, and a gay couple wanting a gay wedding cake from a shop that doesn't make gay wedding cakes?
  
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  frozen2018

  What's the difference between me wanting steak from a restaurant that doesn't serve it, and a gay couple wanting a gay wedding cake from a shop that doesn't make gay wedding cakes?

  Courts have ruled that gay is a protected class. The courts have not ruled that steak eaters are protected.
  
  
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  JeffT

  Religion is also a protected class, but that apparently doesn't apply to cake bakers. I'm going to start putting "Carnivore" on every form that asks for my racial background. Maybe then it can become a protected class.
  
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  LoveUniHateExams

  Courts have ruled that gay is a protected class - are there any legal documents that call gay people a protected class?
  
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  RULES & REGULATIONS

  JeffT

  Let's say you walk into a small restaurant in Iowa and you sit down for dinner. They hand you a menu that is mostly vegetarian dishes but does have sirloin steak. You are a meat eater and decide you want the sirloin steak. The cooks that night are two vegans who are disgusted by your food choice. They tell the waiter that they will not prepare the steak because of morality issues. Eating steak is cruelty to animals.

  The waiter tells you that the cooks refuse to cook you a steak. You are also told that if you don't like their decision you can walk out of the restaurant. You scratch your head....'' What is the difference between cooking eggs, potatoes, or my steak for these cooks?

  Do you walk out, complain, write a letter to the local village about the treatment you received? Were these cooks protected from not cooking your steak that night, that was clearly was on the menu?
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  JeffT

  And that question is what will buy some lawyer his next BMW. Since the gay couple can legally demand that the baker make them a cake, it seems logical (no I don't expect the law to actually be logical) that I should be able to demand a steak.

  Personally I prefer free market solutions to this nonsense. The gay couple can hire somebody else, I can go to a different restaurant. Problem solved, unless your agenda is to force everybody to think the way you do. If I ever decide that's my goal in life, I'll go back to the kingdom hall.
  
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  WillYouDFme

  Lots of bigots and people who seem to follow the mentality of the WT even though they left it, on this blog.

  Leaves lots of people with no much right to criticize the WT I think.
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  Simon

  Courts have ruled that gay is a protected class

  Which is where the problem arises. Short sighted polices enacted, possibly with good intentions, but without considering the contradictions it creates.

  No one should be able to use the weight of government as a club unless it's something that is genuinely a right. If a clerk is refusing to issue a marriage license, the government should intervene (to make sure IT isn't denying that right to someone).

  The government has no business interfering in what is effectively contract law between two parties. No one has the right to demand any type of cake be baked for them and the government is overreaching in it's powers when it allows itself to be used to harass other citizens.
  
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  Simon

  Re: the restaurant - it will be out of business if it hires cooks who won't cook the menu and wait staff who reveal in-house discussions to customers.

  The simple solution would be to say that steak wasn't available on the menu if the cook wasn't willing to cook it. Again, it's up to the restaurant owner to decide which of these staff they want to employ and to customers to decide if they want to eat there or not.

  I think the worst possible solution would be to have the government involved.

  Now, if the customer was gay, should the rules now change and the cooks be forced to cook the steak for them? Isn't it ridiculous that what someone does with their genitals has any bearing on such a situation.