Emilybee, glad to see the Arkansas governor won’t sign the bill.
[url=<a href=“http://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2015/03/31/walmart-ceo-doug-mcmillon-calls-for-gov-asa-hutchinson-to-veto-hb-1228%5DHere’s%5B/url”>http://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2015/03/31/walmart-ceo-doug-mcmillon-calls-for-gov-asa-hutchinson-to-veto-hb-1228]Here’s[/url] the short statement from Walmart, signed by the CEO.
This will fix things 
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rfl43rJtnMs/VRwIOVvYPxI/AAAAAAADVyQ/S_XtEMxgXDg/s1600/Yelp2.jpg
It is beyond silly. You have to be an idiot to change your life plans or a student’s life plans over the perceived, made-up potential effects of a law. I can openly imagine the dumb parents and people saying reconsider IN schools to potential students not knowing they are in one of the 19 other states with the same law and they do not even know it.
No one has discriminated on anyone that anyone could show or prove. Therefore, this entire thing is boiled down to this hypocritical logic, “I am tolerant of other people and their beliefs and ideas only if they comport to what I believe, and all my ideas are the standard to be used to determine the standard.”
I want to live in a state where anyone can walk into any business and be served.
Can you imagine going into a business with a sibling, and the owner says, “We’ll serve you, but we won’t serve your brother.” Don’t care what the reasoning is, I just don’t want to live there, do business there, or visit there. I’ll drive around Indiana.
Amen, midwestdad3.
I mean, here in Michigan we just look at Indiana as that boring/obnoxious barrier between us and Chicago 
I am loving the use of Walmart, as a corporation, having a conscience and beliefs on this thread from the same types who argued that Hobby Lobby, as a corporation, has no conscience or beliefs.
That is not true. You walk into many places of business with no shoes, no shirt, or with a shirt that says “F off”, security will escort you out. No need to serve you in any way. We are one of those companies.
I could go on, as there are tons of reasons that a business can refuse to serve someone, and they discriminate against how customers look and act every single day.
OK, @awcntdb. You say that the Indiana law is NOT for businesses to be able to refuse to serve certain customers. So perhaps then you can answer to me what it IS for. Give me an example of how this law will be used.
“in one of the 19 other states with the same law and they do not even know it.”
Only one other state SC, and now Arkansas if gov’s veto gets override have a bill like Indiana’s. As has been posted many times already on this thread the other bills are different.
There are lots of other schools in states which don’t allow for discrimination on the basis on sexual orientation. and I don’t think there is anything wrong with using something like this as one of the criteria when choosing where one want s to spend four years. And as I have said, H & I have a list of states we won’t move to because of the political climates in those states.
That’s true. However, if I walk into a bike store they can’t say, “We don’t sell to women,” and escort me out. They can refuse to serve me because I have bare feet, but not because I’m a woman. And in Indianapolis, they couldn’t refuse to serve me for being gay, either, if they thought I was gay. But now they can, if their religion tells them to hate gays, as I understand it.
There are lots of places in the world. I don’t need to go to a state that goes out of its way to hate gay people.
:You walk into many places of business with no shoes, no shirt, or with a shirt that says “F off”, security will escort you out. No need to serve you in any way. We are one of those companies."
That rule that your company has applies to everyone - regardless of religion, race, gender or sexual orientation.
If a baker doesn’t want to bake cakes for gay couples then he needs to stop baking all wedding cakes - otherwise it is discriminatory.
@awcntdb But WHY does your business turn away people because they have no shirt or no shoes? My guess is because you don’t want to offend the 99.99% of patrons who are wearing shirts & shoes.
But when your business says “it is our right to serve this straight person who is wearing shirts and shoes, but not this gay person who is wearing shirts and shoes,” you are offending a tremendously wide swath of people: not just people in that person’s class, but friends, siblings, parents, and just about anyone who has a conscience.
And I don’t buy the argument that the law is basically harmless because few people will exercise their right under it. The real harm is that every time you sit down at a lunch counter, you don’t know whether you will be denied service; every time you get on a bus, so to speak, you don’t know whether you will have to sit in the back (speaking figuratively). Many of us had hoped we were moving beyond all this. Why does anyone want to go backwards on this?
Shoes and shirts are necessary for health codes and safety. A gay partner, dark skin, or a star of David necklace does not put the customer or others at risk.
Like midwestdad says, gays/blacks/Jews/etc should not have to go around worrying about whether or not they will be kicked out of a restaurant. Just because the book of Genesis says the sons of Ham are cursed does not give some whacky person the right to refuse to serve people of African descent in their business, for example.
Thanks for the endorsement of me and my 16 year-old son, @awcntdb. He feels that the prevailing social mores of the student body and surrounding population would have an impact on his four years in college, as we have seen with an unhappy WA transplant at college in Indiana and an unhappy relative at another midwest college, neither known for its provincialism. It is a predictable transition for a kid from one predominantly Christian Fundamentalist area of the country to another, but Seattle area kids tend to be surprised by it.
There are plenty of colleges that would be a good academic fit but a poor social one, and plenty that would be good for both. As a kid not afraid to intervene with bullies and bigots, he tends to navigate toward places and situations with fewer, not more. Jocky/fratty colleges are also off his list.
Not quite. The law just lets someone raise the religion defense, it doesn’t mean that a judge has to accept it.
One of my co-workers is a Muslim who was chased out of his country in fear of his life for being not the right kind of Muslim (and lost a couple of family members), so he is very, umm, not accepting of Muslim fundamentalism and has made it his life’s mission to call out Islam for its excesses. He swears that he is going to go to a local Bosniak bakery and demand a cake with the mocking cartoons of Mohammed depicted and sue if he doesn’t get it. Of course, we all worry that he will get a bullet in the head, but that’s another story.
False equivalences.
A person can put on a shirt and shoes or cover up their obscene t-shirt. One can’t change their race or sexual orientation.
For me, that’s bad enough. Indiana has set up a situation where gay-hating businesses think they can discriminate against gays. Like this charming place:
http://www.abc57.com/story/28681598/rfra-first-business-to-publicly-deny-same-sex-service
If I’m gay or have gay friends, I don’t want to have to worry every time I step into a business that they might throw me out. I don’t want these businesses to believe that they have the right to throw out gay people, even if in some cases, they might lose a lawsuit if I sued. It’s bad enough that the state has created an atmosphere where bigoted fundamentalists think they have a legal right to discriminate.
As a matter of law, can’t the bakery say that they don’t provide such services to anyone? Same as they would say they won’t make a porno cake?