AZ Legislature turns back clock, resumes segregation, but this time for gays

[Brittain33]

What AZ is proposing is actually worse than the "historically charged" segregation of the South. In that era of "separate but equal," businesses were offering separate services for whites and blacks. AZ is proposing that it should be legal to deny services entirely. The new law isn't protecting business from offering different services (like how Woolworth's in the south had separate counters for blacks), it is protecting business so they can deny gays service at any counter at all. It isn't sitting at the back of the bus, it is not being let on the bus to begin with.

Functionally, Jim Crow meant that blacks were denied services and there was often no welcoming equivalent they could use. I was reading The Warmth of Other Suns, which profiles three African-Americans who migrated from the south to NY, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and the guy who traveled to Los Angeles could not find any place to stay between Texas and California, and only scattered "safe" places in Texas. In this case with Arizona I think services discriminating against gays would be the exception to the rule, and you'd always be able to find some decent restaurant, florist, photographer, etc... while for blacks in the Jim Crow south you might be locked out of any decent service.

[Brittain33]

This bill has even lost the ultimate weathervane for Republican conventional wisdom. Mitt tweeted to Jan Brewer to veto.

[Brittain33]

I don't think you needed the URL to guess which congressman decided to step up and support this bill.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/louie-gohmert-arizona-anti-gay-bill

[Brittain33]

It was apparently only a two page bill

Which is why it is so astonishing that it could be so misinterpreted by the media and by most of the posters in this thread.  SB 1062 is not segregation. It does not even mention gays or sexual orientation and it does not mention discrimination.

Neither DOMA nor any of the state DOMAs mention gays or sexual orientation and do not mention discrimination. Would you say that they have nothing to do with gay rights? I trust not.

[Brittain33]

I'm not sure why different feelings about requires different laws. Why can't they give the perpetrator 5 yrs for assault in both cases?

"Different feelings" is why we have different punishments for manslaughter, second degree murder, and first degree murder, rather than just one catch-all murder conviction with the same punishment.

[Brittain33]

I'm part of a same-sex couple and half the time, we go grocery shopping together. Sometimes I'm too busy and he needs to go alone, and sometimes I'm available and it's always much faster because I can wait in line for cold cuts while he gets other stuff on our list. Then we check out together.

[Brittain33]

What I find really weird about conservative apologias of this law is the insistence that a wedding photographer refusing to accept gay couples as clients is any different from someone turning that couple away from a restaurant or grocery store. What are the grounds for that distinction?

A photographer's ability to do their job well is influenced by comfort with their couple. For a restaurant or grocery store, if you're professional, it shouldn't make a difference.

[Brittain33]

To a degree that depends on the restaurant.  A fast food joint doesn't require any empathy with the customer, but I could see it with a higher class restaurant with extensive personal service as part of the experience. 

That's why I stressed the importance of being a professional. If you're a professional waiter, you don't have to really do anything different to provide good service - you just have to do your job and have some basic integrity. I think it strains credulity to say that a waiter needs to endorse a customer's lifestyle to serve them and take their orders. A photographer has to be comfortable capturing intimate moments (in a public sense.) All that said it's a difference of degree rather than kind and it's where I find myself.

Note that we've shifted here from "religious objections" to basic comfort/disgust. Which is what this is really about, anyway.

[Brittain33]

If all the waiter does is take orders and then serves the food, you'd be right, but at the highest level, restaurants do try to go beyond that. 

It's ok if you choose not to accept the distinction.