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Originally Posted by liquidlight
Actually I was aimed the other direction, more at the spirit than the letter. That rather than sponsoring equal rights for everyone there is continually legislation that seperates an individual group and grants them specific rights.
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Here's the deal, though - the legislation is not separating an individual group and granting them rights, it's simply adding a criterion (sexual orientation) to the list of things that can't be used as basis for discrimination (age, gender, race, etc.). It's taking a group that's very specifically NOT protected and bringing them under the blanket of protection that is currently afforded to every other person...who's not gay. If the bill were saying something like "every apartment complex that doesn't have at least 10% gay/lesbian tenants has to rent preferentially to homosexuals until the population is proportionately representative." Now THAT would be preferential treatment. This is not guaranteeing special rights, it's guaranteeing EQUAL rights. I'm not sure how you would go about ensuring equal rights for everyone without specifying the things people are not allowed to discriminate based on. (Sorry for the bad grammar.) It's perfectly legitimate for lenders to discriminate based on credit history (sorry, dude), or for hotels not to rent rooms to minors who have no legal standing (age of reason changes based on social norms); but I don't see any problem with specifiying how people are NOT allowed to discriminate against certain groups who currently are likely to experience discrimination. Not expressing myself very well.....d'oh.
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I think a market-driven approach as you put it would be one of many things that could foster a lot more acceptance on an equal scale without adding things into law that create not only an ideologic separation but a very legal separation as well. Without coming together and accepting everyone as equal moving forward becomes a bitter battle that no number of laws is going to correct. What it boils down to is that with any law of this nature, regardless of it's intent, if you quantify a particular group you are segregating them despite your intent and sooner or later it's going to only further the very division that you were attempting to eliminate.
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The problem I have with a market-driven system is that the whims (and therefore the values) of the market change with what is financially expedient, not what is ethically right. From the legislation: "The legislature hereby finds and declares that practices of discrimination against any of its inhabitants because of race, creed, color, national origin, families with children, sex, marital status, sexual orientation, age, or the presence of any sensory, mental, or physical disability or the use of a trained dog guide or service animal by a disabled person
are a matter of state concern, that such discrimination threatens not only the rights and proper privileges of its inhabitants but menaces the institutions and foundation of a free democratic state." Such basic protections of fundamental principles of democracy would seem to me to be the domain of the state and not of corporate entities.