In America, I've already seen individual rights and liberties sacrificed on the liberal altars of multiculturalism and diversity. The further that America shifts Left, the worse it gets.
When I was a young man, it was quite common in restaurants and bars to see pre-manufactured signs that proclaimed "We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone" as soon as you entered the door. Whereas some business owners may have posted the sign for purely racist reasons, most proprietors were merely putting potential customers---and troublemakers---on notice that an individual's behavior and personal appearance would determine whether the owner would do business with that person on his property. [Some restaurants still require their male patrons to wear a tie and jacket before they will serve them.]
But, because of the hyper-sensitivity of some minority groups, posting property-right notices like that has become "politically incorrect", and may even leave the owner open to lawsuits. In their place, you'll now see signs stating "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service"---mostly due to government health codes.
In today's "over-accomodating" America, I'm surprised that "nudist rights" activists have not cried "nudist discrimination"---or condemned such rules as "Jim Crow" laws.
The article excerpted below illustrates how absurdly the common sense value of "discrimination" has been universely demonized in Europe---to appease various "rights" groups.
Discrimination is not evil
EuropeNews 21 April 2010
By AMT & Henrik Ræder Clausen, additional translation by JLH
"The problem is that if we don’t have the guts to differentiate between ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’, and to act accordingly, we get eaten. Or shot, as was the case at Fort Hood, where Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan should have been suspended from service long before he managed to shoot 41 people, killing 31 of them. Fear of ‘discriminating’ constrained the hand of the intelligence services, with fatal results."
"Political correctness, ‘religious sensitivity’, ‘anti-discrimination’ — the problem has many names. Yet, they have a common core — a denial of our right to act in accordance with our values. International organizations and human rights committees deal with problems on levels of abstraction bordering on the absurd — thus the generic condemnation of ‘discrimination’..."
"Discrimination means differentiating between what is desirable and what is not. It is a subjective evaluation of things, events and persons, and by human nature we do tend to distinguish between good and bad, useful and useless, desirable and unattractive. Laws against ‘discrimination’ as such — that is, laws that are overly broad — deny us the right to differentiate in certain fields of life, and conversely assign others rights to not be discriminated against."
"This is, as a principle of law, rather abstract, and a significant departure from how we live our lives. In daily life we discriminate who to visit, who to date, who to start projects with etc. We do so based on personal evaluations and prejudices (well- or ill-founded), but generally we do have the right to evaluate things personally and act upon our judgement. ‘Discrimination’ simply isn’t a crime in the same sense that ‘theft’ or ‘rape’ is. "
"There’s an asymmetry here, though. Customers are still free to choose their shops based on any criteria they desire, while business owners do not have that right. This actually constitutes a limitation to the property rights of the business owner. He owns his business, and as such has a fundamental right to do with his business as he pleases, including turning away potential customers."
"The principle of ownership implies that the owner has the right to deny others the use of his property at his own discretion. Anti-discrimination laws violate this fundamental principle."
(read the rest of this excellent piece here)
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