Shadow2
6.5 Creedmoor
Discrimination laws are a bunch of BS ... For one if someone doesn't want to serve me for being "White Privileged Male" then I will bring my buying power to someone who does. Nobody has a right to live in a particular building, eat in a particular establishment or have someone respect them. A crime directed at you for what ever reason is a crime. "Hate speech" "hate crimes" are absolute hogwash and should never be distinguished from any other criminal acts. Acceptance doesn't come from forcing people to accept. Can anyone force you to be strait with a jail sentence? Then its absurd to think anyone can be forced to be tolerant with the threat of jail. Do I think people should do the things you speak of, no I do not, its fucked up IMO, but there should never be laws that force a belief system on anyone, it's dangerous.
Let's stick to the issue of serving gay people for sake of an example. Yes, there should be punishment for business owners who refuse to serve gay people, and it should be the exact same punishment for refusing to serve black people, or refusing to serve Jews, etc. Those punishments are already in place in our laws and no one seems to question them. Discrimination against gays falls in the exact same category.
Failing to address some properly? As in someone insisting on calling a trans-woman "he"? That's just rude, so no particular punishment, at least not any more than calling a black person the n word. It might in some circumstances be considered "fighting words", if it's part of a long tirade or some other actions it might be simple assault, but in general it should probably just be ignored.
I very much think that discrimination against LGBT people should be treated exactly the way we treat discrimination against someone because of their race or religion. The exact details of what happens are up to lawmakers.
If this thread existed on the LGC forum? Well, I'm a moderator there now, so I can speak with a bit of authority on that. Podmonkey would have been banned almost immediately, because his posts call for violence and that's a violation of the LGC forum rules. Steal2B *might* have been banned, because his post could also been seen as promoting violence, though that one would probably depend on how cranky the mod was feeling that day.
The rest of the posts? Well, they certainly don't violate the forum rules, and if you swap the political labels I've seen pretty much these same posts on the LGC forum. You guys would certainly get people angry, but as a moderator, I at least would not see any reason to intervene. Some of the other moderators over there are more trigger happy, though, and they might ban someone if they thought that person was just insulting liberals without good cause.
For example, going over there and saying that liberals are communists won't fly. That will be seen as just trolling and trying to get a rise out of people, because most liberals are quite simply not communists. We do have one forum member who I know identifies as a died in the wool "workers control the means of production" socialist, but most of us support regulated capitalism. Sure we want more regulations than exist in the US today, but not really that much more, and some of what we want is what we used to have, like some OSHA rules, or just variants on what already exists, like higher gas mileage rules.