Discriminating Laws

  There has been a lot of press about the newly signed Indiana religious freedom act. As you know it's been mostly hostile. Many groups are advocating for a boycott of the state.
  I can, to a certain extent, understand this. There is, however,a part of me that finds the outrage at little odd. Discrimination in retail establishments has been going on for a long time. I'm pretty sure most of us at one time or another have been given slow service or no service at a retail establishment because of looks, dress or judgments about potential income. I remember a story I was told once about the time my Dad went to buy a car about 35 years ago. He had done some research and went to the dealership to make arrangements to purchase the car he had decided on. The owner of the dealership refused to sell to my Dad. He knew what my Dad did for a living( in a small town everyone knows everything) and he decided that my Dad could not afford the car that he wanted. My Dad wasn't trying to buy a high end car.
  What did my Dad do? Did he yell and scream? Did he spread the word to get people to boycott that dealership? Did he file a lawsuit? No. None of the above. My Dad drove to a car dealership in a nearby town. The salesman there worked with my Dad and found that he more than qualified for the small loan he would need to purchase the car that he wanted. My Dad bought the car there. My Dad purchased every car from that time on from the second dealer and took his cars to their repair shop. When I bought my first car, I bought it from the second dealership.
  That, I believe, is the way to handle the Indiana religious freedom law. It's unfair to boycott the whole state. That will hurt a lot of people who do not deserve to have their livelihood ripped out from underneath them. If you don't want to support a business that will refuse service or goods to certain groups based on moral or religious grounds then don't patronize those places. If enough people do this then the business will have to do one of three things, change their policy, raise their prices for those who do patronize or go out of business. It's that simple.
  I'm also amazed at the amount of outrage. It's not like there are no other laws like this on the books. In fact, after the Roe v Wade decision, many states enacted conscience clauses for heath care providers. While these laws mainly dealt with things such as abortions, oral contraceptives and the morning after pill, I've read that these clauses could  also invoked to deny care to AIDS patients and infertility treatments to unmarried female patients. These laws prevented employers from retaliating against health care providers who refuse care in certain situations based on conscience clauses.
  One could make the case that a health care provider who refuses treatment to certain groups of people is discriminating against them. Yet some of these laws have been on the books for 30 years. Where was all the outrage then? If laws that allow people to discriminate are wrong then why are the heath care worker conscience clauses still on the books?
   I'm not sure what the answer to this is. I'd like to think there is some way to balance this out, but I'm just not sure it's possible. I do know that I'm tired of some of the double standards this is causing. I was reading comments after one article about the Indiana law. Someone wrote about a situation when a bakery refused to bake a wedding cake for a lesbian couple's wedding. The couple sued the bakery. Many were angered at the fact that the bakery would refuse to bake the cake. To test the laws, a person went into another bakery and asked for a cake with an anti gay message on it. The bakery refused and the person sued them. This time public opinion was firmly on the side of the bakery who refused to make the cake. The point of this comment was to point out that businesses either have the right to pick and choose what they will do and who they will serve or not.
  This comment made a lot of sense to me. If the trend is going toward making discrimination illegal then we will need a lot more laws than we currently have and we will have to decide which groups are worthy of protection and which are not.
  I'm not sure how things are going to go with the Indiana law when it goes into effect on 1 July. I'm not sure what is going to happen in other states where similar legislation is being considered. Whatever happens I strongly suspect that no one will be happy.