If you’ve heard anything at all about HB83 or the “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” in the past week, it is very likely that you’ve heard an opinion talking about how the bill is going to allow for businesses to discriminate against any particular demographic. Of course suppose the bill was created to serve this function, I certainly would not be writing this article at all.
The bill states that as a part of one’s rights to exercise freedom of religion or moral conscience that one should be allowed to “withhold benefits.” This is where people think the problem of bigoted business owners refusing service to the LGBTQ community arises. Note that the bill is not only protecting religious people, but rather anybody who has a moral conscience, which I’d like to assume we have.
Now let me say that a bigoted business owner refusing to serve someone because they’re gay, is completely indefensible, and that I’d be hard pressed to find a worse reason to refuse somebody service. That is to say there are completely valid reasons to refuse serving someone. For instance, suppose that I owned an auto shop. A client who is known to kill puppies, light buildings on fire and sell hard drugs to children comes in to my shop. Serving this individual would certainly violate my moral conscience, and I think I should have the right to refuse him or her service. However, this begs the question of whether or not it is within my rights to refuse him or her service in the first place. To answer this we need to ask what a business actually is or rather what it isn’t.
A business is not for the welfare of the general public. It is so that a business owner can support their own lives. To suggest that they have to serve anybody at all is absurd, they don’t owe anybody anything, and before somebody says that there are businesses that serve the public for the sake of serving the public, those are called non-profits. It is the nature of decision making that when someone chooses one option, they are doing so in lieu of another. So when I refuse the puppy-killing client, I am forgoing the option of having some of his or her money. I relinquish something that would have supported my well-being. In this way a business is completely justified refusing service to anyone.
Weirdly if you apply my argument, I do end up giving the bigoted business owner the right to refuse service to his or her customer for any reason whatsoever. That is to say his or her reason for refusing to serve someone is that they are LGBTQ is still stupid, but the business owner is completely within his or her rights to do so.
In an interview State Representative Nathan Winters, said that we need to preserve the moral conscience of the public.
“The basis of freedom is that every person can live within the law, while having the liberty to think freely. The opposite of freedom is the coercion of conscience. Every American is guaranteed these basic freedoms under the constitution and federal law,” Winters told the Casper Star Tribune.
So should we be concerned? Through my writing it may seem that I support the bill, and in many ways I do, but in other more compelling ways I don’t. I do think the individual freedom to protect moral conscience is important, and I do think one should be able to refuse service, but as of now there are too many people who will use this bill as a tool to discriminate, rather than protecting themselves.
WyPols.com writer, Jordan Harper, puts it beautifully in his article regarding HB83.
“Regardless of the intentions behind the bill, many construe the language very differently than representative Winters,” Harper said.
His article covers a lot of the common worries that people have because of this bill, such as the possibility that the bill allows county clerks to refrain from issuing same-sex marriage licenses. For those of you that won’t read his article, the bill doesn’t interact with county clerks whatsoever, at least it shouldn’t. There was an article about this facet of the bill in the Casper Star Tribune, but the article has been stricken since.
I think that generally, a bill in this ballpark is nothing to worry about. However, we happen to live in Wyoming, where the average business owner is likely to hold the sentiment that the LGBTQ community is somehow immoral. As of now, the bill is likely to be more harmful than helpful and in Laramie there is already a movement to prevent businesses from being discriminatory in the form of the Laramie Non-discrimination Ordinance.
