Well, vis a vis discrimination laws:<\/p>\n
Their identity: People who own rental property in a number of cities (Berkeley and San Francisco among them) which have passed ordinances adding sexual orientation to the list of banned categories of discrimination in housing.<\/p>\n
The harm done: Their ability to dispose of their property as they wished – specifically, to have a degree of control over the people living in their house – was constrained. In addition, their ability to behave in non-discriminatory but carefree ways is impinged. Instead of not caring at all about the sexual orientation of an applicant, a landlord now has to care about it even if he or she has no intention or desire to discriminate.<\/p>\n
Some of those people, a lot of them even, didn\u2019t want to discriminate in that fashion anyway; others (usually for religious reasons, though not always) did. Even the former group is negatively impacted by the law – the creation of a category of discrimination opens them to false claims (whether malicious or simple misunderstandings) of such discrimination even when they did not intend to discriminate.<\/p>\n
Pre-ordinance, Landlord X might reject Tenant Y for some bona fide reason, or if he just didn\u2019t like the cut of her jib. Post-ordinance, if X rejects Y and Y happens to be gay, Y can make a claim (however implausible) that X discriminated on the basis of orientation. X must now take exceptional care in rejecting gay applicants for bona fide reasons – particularly if through happenstance X ends up renting to a straight tenant instead.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So, what Robert is doing here is asking for “can’t refuse to rent house to gay people” a.k.a. “landlord can’t dispose property as zie wishes” to be defined as “hurt.”<\/p>\n
I’m opposed to this definition, because of a metaphor that I’m going to steal from The Angry Black Woman<\/a>, whose archives I spent a shocking amount of yesterday reading — on account of her being so brilliant, and all.<\/p>\n If a child has ten pieces of candy, and his sister has no pieces of candy, and there are only ten pieces of candy in the house, and his mother takes five pieces of the child’s candy away [ETA: to give to his sister], then the child losing candy will cry. The child losing candy is not losing rights. The child losing candy is not being oppressed. The child losing candy is *experiencing* hurt, but he is not actually being hurt.<\/p>\n Privelege is something we often only notice when it’s lacking. A space that priveleges both men and women equally will be perceived as discriminating against men because it does not cater to their interests.<\/p>\n And so here.<\/p>\n So, please shift the argument about gay rights and hurt here, and please wander to the other location if you want to talk about politics as rationalization, the evils of extremism, or the tyranny of the majority, or kittens.<\/p>\n Oh, okay, you can talk about kittens in either thread. I’ll start.<\/p>\n UPDATE: Sailorman would like the following quotes to speak for his position:<\/p>\n \nTake gay rights and abortion rights, for example: they seem pretty obvious to ME, and I don\u2019t much give a shit [if] granting them pisses the hell out of some people.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t doubt, though, there are people whose lives have been personally worsened by the granting of abortion rights or gay rights. I just don\u2019t care about them.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I apologize for the implication that Sailorman is trying to take rights away from gay people. It was unintended. I simply disagree with him; I do doubt that there UPDATE: Comments on this thread are closed. — So, there was me, grumbling that my post about Durkheim’s “tyranny of the majority,” the Overton window, and the general concept of politics as rationalization, had become a thread about whether or … Continue reading ![\"A](\"http:\/\/www.rachelswirsky.com\/kitten.jpg\")
<\/p>\nare people<\/s> is anyone whose life has been personally worsened by the granting of gay rights.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"