The right to discriminate...

If I’d Known You Were Coming, I Wouldn’t Have Baked a Cake

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

Activists are searching out small businesses to destroy, if the owner doesn’t want to make a cake celebrating gay weddings. These predators want owners financially destroyed, and preferably jailed, for such a hate crime. Of course, the actual hate crime is calling down state violence on the peaceful.

In a free society, unlike the current USA, customers are free to choose the commercial enterprises they wish to patronize, and owners may make their own decisions. Virtually no business owner will turn down a paying customer–Jim Crow laws, for example, had to be enforced by state violence. But if you own property, you should be able to make the rules.

Some years ago, a woman colleague from the Ron Paul congressional campaign and I went to lunch in a gay area of Houston. We weren’t in the all-male restaurant for long before some of the patrons began muttering nasty and obscene things. As we prepared to leave, the manager asked us to go.

Both of us–being libertarians–upheld the restaurant’s right to discriminate. That is tolerance. Indeed, what decent person would seek to force himself, at the point of a government gun, on those who do not want him? Freedom of association and disassociation is a bedrock of liberty and social peace.

Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/if-id-known-you-were-coming-i-wouldnt-have-baked-a-cake/