Very Interesting

A privately owned landscaping company specifically refuses business to a homosexual couple, and they're now the scourge of the Internet blogosphere. Kudos to the L.A. Times for this slick coverage. I wish I could get their paper delivered in Madison. But about this specific story, I have two things to say:

1) There are few rights more important in the U.S. than freedom of association. Neither party today seems to really get that. Freedom of association does not mean freedom from the pressure to associate, societal or otherwise - and the Garden Guy corporation certainly grasps that fact. It should not be against the law for privately owned businesses to discriminate against homosexuals, but it also shouldn't be against the law for newspapers, magazines, and television news stations to expose these businesses for what they are: shady, laughable picketers of bigotry. There's a great dynamic at work here.

2) ...but there's a downside to that dynamic, and it doesn't need to be that way. Assuming the husband and wife who own this business are telling the truth, their actions have resulted in many death threats and vile insults. Treating the opposition ideologies in such an ugly, callous manner is not something that the civil rights-minded community should engage in. That kind of thing discredits a great cause. The best thing to do about discriminatory business owners isn't to flood their email box with death threats, but to peacefully make sure their discrimination does not go unnoted and move on. There can be no moral high ground if someone like Sabrina Farber is being told she should not be able to bear children. Please. Insults of that caliber were what Jim-Crow southerners yelled at African-American schoolchildren being led into integrated schoolhouses during the 1950s.

ERS