As many of you are aware, or perhaps not aware, the State of Alabama signed into law House Bill 24. This bill provides protections “to prohibit the state from discriminating against or refusing to license a provider of child placing services licensed by the state on the basis that the provider declines to provide a child placing service or carry out an activity that conflicts with the religious beliefs of the provider.” Private, faith based, adoption agencies can now freely determine if a child is suited for a situation without fear of being shut down by the state.
Detractors of this bill have stated that this “allows discrimination against the LGBT community,” and that “this bill was passed because of the (unconstitutional) Obergefell opinion of the Supreme Court.”
What many fail to realize is that individuals, and privately owned businesses, are entirely within their natural rights to, simply put, discriminate. Discrimination is nothing new. It’s something we all do each and every day. We just don’t like to think about it. When was the last time you went out to eat? You had to make a choice as to where you would spend your money. Given the choices, you had to discriminate against all but one of the options.
Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, people have begun to develop a warped perception of when discrimination is one’s right, and when it is not one’s right. Prior to the aforementioned act, individuals and privately owned businesses were free to discriminate against anyone for any reason. One did not need a reason to tell someone that they were not going to serve them, and rightfully so.
If you believe in the basic principles of freedom then the following won’t be hard for you to understand. If you are a socialist, communist, or any variant of one of those cousin philosophies then this may be a hard pill for you to swallow.
There are three basic principles that you must understand. The first is that you own your property. The second is self-ownership. The third is that you should not initiate aggression against anyone. Because you own yourself and your property, no one can demand that you give them your property or demand that you work for them against your will. To say otherwise is to argue in favor of Marxist ideals and slavery.
Simply put, you do not have a right to essentially make someone your slave simply because the government is prohibiting the freedom of association. If you are on the side of prohibiting discrimination via legislative force then you aren’t a hero championing for anyone’s rights. You are a cultural Marxist who doesn’t understand the rights of the individual.
In the words of the great torchbearer of freedom, the bastion of Liberty, Ayn Rand said, “The right to life is the source of all rights — and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.”
