The Ethics of Bigotry

Let’s try this one as a hypothetical question: Imagine that you own a business and that a customer approaches you about a large custom order. Now imagine that for some reason you do not want to accept this customer’s business, because he or she belongs to a group that you personally find repellent, for social, political, ethical, moral or just personal reasons. There’s no particular reason for you to take the commission; your business is doing well enough without it, there are many other vendors that this customer could use for the same purpose, and not getting the custom order will not impact them or their purpose in any meaningful way. Our hypothetical question is: do you have any obligation to take on their order despite your personal feelings about the customer and/or the group they represent?

In the case in Indianapolis this week a bakery owner declined to produce an order of specially decorated cookies for a National Coming-Out Day celebration, because he and his family are social conservatives and were not comfortable providing product for such a purpose. There is no indication that the business or the owners are in any other respect discriminatory against gay people or anyone else; in fact, the bakery operates in an area of Indy which is also home to a large population of gay people, and neither side has ever mentioned any conflicts before. Certainly there is no indication that the owners have ever done anything to any minority group that was any more severe than declining to accept a special order for a specific occasion – which isn’t saying much, as the business doesn’t generally do special decoration work anyway. But because one of the owners was unwise enough to express his discomfort with being associated with such an event, the company is being lambasted in the press, boycotted by various civil rights groups, and threatened with eviction from their retail space by their landlord, which happens to be the City government…

If the bakery’s refuse to do business with the event organizers was somehow a departure from their regular practice (that is, if they made special decorated cookies for everyone else, but not for gay people), or if it was somehow keeping the group from doing something (that is, if the lack of special decorated cookies was somehow going to prevent National Coming-Out Day from being celebrated) this case would be a lot more clear cut; instead, as I noted in my original post about this crisis, if the owner hadn’t made a point of expounding his views on the subject to one of the event organizers, no one would ever have heard about it. It’s only controversial at all because of the suggestion of a company not wanting to do business with a specific group, or be publicly associated with a specific event being put on by a specific group. But is this is wrong, does that mean that every company should be required to do business with every customer who asks them to, regardless of any further consideration?

If the law requires you to accept business from anyone who asks, you will almost certainly encounter a customer from a group that you find personally repellant sooner or later, be it white supremacists, Christian fundamentalists, Scientologists, Freemasons, Buddhists, Quakers, gun owners, dog owners, homeowners, golfers, baseball fans, football fans, soccer fans, athletes, libertines, libertarians, Libertarians, Greens, Reds, Pinks, Blues, nuclear scientists or clog dancers; should you be required to accept their request for service regardless of how you feel about them, their cause, or their purpose? More to the point, perhaps, how do we deal with cases where one person’s beliefs come into direct conflict with another person’s beliefs? Discrimination against another person on the basis of their religion is considered morally and ethically wrong, but what are we supposed to do about a case where one person’s religion actually requires them to regard members of another faith as an abomination (which happens more than you’d think in some parts of the country)? How do we censure someone whose faith actually requires them not to bake cookies for a specific group without interfering with the free practice of their religion?

At the end of the day, we’re still left with a question that has been nagging at the American social conscience for at least fifty years now: at what point should a business be allowed to reserve the right to refuse service to whoever they want, and at what point do we have the right to legislate those rights away?

It’s worth thinking about…