What do you think about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in regards to LGBT and religion?

MayCaesar

I have the exact opposite view: that there should be no laws containing words such as "race", "color", "religion", "sex" or "national origin". Everyone should be treated as an individual, and special categories should not be considered. The only way to truly defeat discrimination is to make the categories people tend to discriminate by obsolete, and these anti-discrimination laws do exactly the opposite, ingraining in people's minds the idea that race, color, religion, sex or national origin defines the individual.

I resent any form of identity politics. I do not care about groups and collectives; I care about individuals. If someone has to play the race/sex/religion/whatever card for me to treat them better than I otherwise would, then what it tells me is that they have nothing else to offer, and hence they do not deserve better treatment in the first place. And if they do not, then the card is useless anyway, so why would we need the law giving it to people?

It is okay for employers or sellers to discriminate against groups of people; let them reap the consequences of their anti-market behavior, as their competitors not employing such discrimination gain more high quality workers and loyal customers. The government should neither promote nor condemn discrimination; it should stay away from the topic entirely.

piloteer

@MayCaesar

One reason that law was enacted was because non-white American citizens were being barred from, and treated as second class citizens in public places. If they pay taxes just as everyone else does, but are not allowed the same access as all citizens, then their collective rights as well as their individual rights are being violated. There would have been no way to describe who the oppressed people are without using terms based on their identity.    

MayCaesar

@piloteer

That predicament was a result of governmental pro-discrimination laws. They had been repealed very recently, and the market did not manage to react to it yet - yet Lyndon Johnson wanted to rush the change. It is never a good idea to try to artificially force societal change, especially when it is already happening at its natural pace.

Fast-forward to 2019, and the African-American population is still the poorest, the least educated and the most criminal racial group in the country. In contrary, say, the Asian population, which was very strongly discriminated against in 40-s and 50-s, but which never attracted much attention from the civil rights movement, is the opposite: the richest, the most educated and the least criminal racial group in the country.
More so, the biggest racial group (Whites) is far less prone to closely interact with African-Americans, than Asians. 0.3% of all White husbands have Black wives, and 1.0% of them have Asian wives - that is given that the Black population in the US is over 1.5 times as big as the Asian population. 

You see the same thing everywhere else where the government went out of its way to try to remedy societal ills. The indigenous population in Canada is mostly concentrated in segregated areas with abysmal quality of life, and aboriginal populations in Australia and New Zealand have overwhelming unemployment rates and almost no meaningful interaction with the rest of the population.

This brute force approach simply does not work. However hard it is, the way to fight discrimination is not through governmental action, but through elimination of the concept of different categories of individuals based on irrelevant superficial traits in the society. That is not done by the government; that is done by the people. When people outsource this job to the government, then the natural solution is not given a chance to arise.

The free market principle does not only apply to economics, but to societies as a whole as well. Let the individual world views compete naturally, and let the best one win. Trying to socially engineer the "right" outcome through governmental action is the same as trying to economically engineer the "right" outcome through socialist policies: it is too brute an approach to work, and predictably it does not work.

RickeyD

@smoothie ; How is the LGBTQ community suffering civil rights violations? It was my understanding that the Civil Rights

Act of 1964, relevant to sex, pertained to male and female equality, not sexual perversion. Why should sexual perverts possess special rights, special protections? It is the LGBTQ community who has opted to live in opposition to Nature, to Morality, to human physiology, to decency and respect for their own body.

I don't think LGBTQ deserves any special treatment other than psychological and spiritual intervention and laws passed to STOP the LGBTQ from forcing their sexual perversion on society and especially our children. Take the debauchery back to the closet and stop celebrating mental illness, demonic possession in our streets and in our places of work, worship, entertainment. LGBTQ shames our Nation!

piloteer

@MayCaesar

If oppression/discrimination is based on specific identity traits, how can they be addressed without using terms describing those traits? This form of discrimination wasn't aimed at individuals, it was aimed at entire groups of the population, and it was based on their identity traits. Regardless of how quickly you think LBJ acted on this law, the oppression was illegal, and regardless of individualist empowerment, it was an institutionalized oppression, so it would have been impossible to address it without demonstrating that the discrimination is levied based of identity.        

MayCaesar

@piloteer

I am not saying that one should never point out the trait people are discriminated based on. What I am saying is that the solution should not involve that trait stated in any way. Aside from it not coming from the government (which is the most basic prerequisite for success of virtually any social evolution process), it also should target the individual, not the group or the trait. Otherwise, descent into identity politics is inevitable, and both history and basic logic show that identity politics only perpetuates the problems it is intended to address.

Discrimination disappears naturally surprisingly quickly when people stop making a big deal out of it and let natural processes play out. A free market would quickly solve most institutionalised discrimination issues, because discrimination is very costly. Systematic economical discrimination, for example, can only last for a long period of time with the aid of the government, otherwise market competition is going to obliterate it - as has already happened with regards to some racial, gender, religious, ethnic, national groups.

One of the core issues in humanity is people's strive for instant gratification. They want to solve every problem at once, with one decisive action. Yet most truly amazing things require time and effort to happen, and it is especially true with regards to social reforms. Impatience kills those reforms at their route, leading to situations like the one we have now, where African-Americans have not been discriminated against by the system for many decades, yet still mostly remain at the bottom of the economical ladder.

RickeyD

@piloteer ; Johnson cared NOTHING for minorities, gays, civil rights...Johnson cared about Democrat votes and pandered to Blacks for a voting-base that would be solidified for decades in ignorance of Truth.

smoothie

@RickeyD Yet you possess special rights to denounce LGBT as perverts and force society to abide by your bible. Christians have opted to live in a life of authoritarian rule of the creation of a god figure. Denying nature, science, and logic, yet we still allow your freedom. Your argument is void when you live in these circumstances. LGBT is not so different when it comes to ideology, the only difference is you actively crusade against LGBT with yours.

Here ill play Rickey for a second,

"Why should religion possess special rights, special protections? I don't think christianity deserves any special treatment other than psychological and spiritual intervention and laws passed to STOP christianity from forcing their twisted views on society and especially our children. Take the debauchery back to the church and stop celebrating brainwashing, discrimination, dictatorship of private life, and denial of science. Christianity shames our Nation!"

Your only argument is your own personal hatred and bigotry. If you deny LGBT protections, then I have the same right to rally for the destruction of religious protection.

However, I don't do this, because I have basic respect for fellow humanity and don't want to force the country to "convert" people I don't like. We can co-exist in America. It's possible.

piloteer

@MayCaesar

African Americans are still oppressed by the system. The justice system has proven to be discriminatory against African Americans by giving them longer terms than their white counterparts who've committed the same crime. 20% longer on average. It's also been shown that African Americans have less of a chance of getting a plea bargain, and on average they have to pay more for bail, and they have less of a chance of even getting the opportunity to be bailed out and are forced to remain in prison while they await their trials. It's also been proven that they wait in prison for their trial for longer periods of time than their white counterparts who've committed the same crime. 

I think the argument your trying to make is that social attitudes about African-Americans should have been allowed to change through time without having to resort to making civil rights a law. Aside from the fact that that is an argument of capitulation toward government overreach, that argument would also have to assume that the majority of society was opposed to civil rights, which is not true. Social attitudes were on the side of civil rights. The law was needed to prohibit government entities from disregarding the doctrine of the constitution. 

If the discrimination is based on identity, there would be no valid way of addressing it without referring to the discrimination and the identity traits it targets.        

MayCaesar

@piloteer

First of all, I am not a fan of using exaggerated terms to describe any phenomena. Virtually no one in the US is "oppressed". People in North Korea or Cuba are oppressed; African-Americans in the US may be disadvantaged, but not oppressed by any stretch of imagination, and 99% African-Americans have it better in the US, than 90% of the population in the rest of the world has it.

Next, what you are describing is the way the government treats them, not the way the market treats them. Which is kind of my point to begin with: the market sorts these things out naturally, and only the governmental interference inhibits this natural process.

My argument was that the government should not use such categories as "race" in its legal system; it should treat people independently of such categories. The Civil Rights act in question does the opposite and outlaws discrimination by race explicitly, which undermines this idea.

Discrimination of any group of people by private market actors is not unconstitutional; everyone is free to decide who to interact with voluntarily and how. The market mechanisms strongly disadvantage those who discriminate against certain groups, however. If one company hires African-Americans and another does not, then the former company has a larger pool of applicants to choose from and hence, on average, will be able to pack itself with higher-quality employees, while paying them the same wages - and this competitive advantage is huge on a truly free market, where every company is tested to its limit and the smallest disadvantage can bankrupt it.

piloteer

@MayCaesar

The discrimination of US minorities was, and is based on identity politics. The very oppression itself is identity politics. It was not the markets that were oppressing minorities, it was the government itself. The form of oppression used was based specifically on their identity, and the free market was incapable of allowing non-white citizens full access to public places. It needed to be the government that addressed the issue, and it needed to describe the issue. Since the issue was the identity politics that you speak of, it would have been impossible to address it without demonstrating it.

The United States has the highest imprisoned population on earth, and the highest percentage of the population that is imprisoned. Oppression isn't based on your feelings of what it means, it's based on a cold hard definition, and the United States most certainly fits that definition. Aside from the highest threat of imprisonment on earth, there's also the fact the US has a war every 10 to 15 years on average, and it's citizens are forced to fund those wars and possibly be drafted into them. Then there's the fact that minorities are being targeted by law enforcement. And when was the last time a North Korean had to worry about a mass shooting? Your description of oppression is relative and speculative.        

piloteer

@RickeyD

Shut the fu€k up. The adults are Talking!!!!!! 

John_C_87

State of the union on discrimination. A presidential state of the Union.

Civil rights Act’s by basic principle all have an underling issue between the public understanding of liberty and freedom as united state conflict. The state of the union requiring attention is the basic translations that are not interpretable between freedom, as free must consist of both no self-value and no assigned cost. The failure to implement constitutional representation leaving room for the more complicated crimes to go without question in the court room of law  as we are presumed to not be allowed to question idea of cost. Legal precedent addressing all 1st Amendment cost as state of the union in free speech, free press, and free religion are in fact many times registered grievance. Verbal or written.

A deeper fundamental problem is do any Amendment of American Constitution adequately addressed prisoners of War becoming American citizen as a constitutional difference in understanding of all race and skin color. What crimes disqualify POW’s from citizen ship? This includes many nationalities as a united state. The ideal scenario would have been to address an equality in basic principle and law to P.O.W’s as it is the largest united state which describes slave of any kind.

Again, one of my favorite debate points as duty in woman’s constitutional right. All woman had made no attempt to created themselves equal in a way that did not set them apart in a witnessed account of conditional representation in preservation, in a way easy for all woman to understand and use in explanation.

Gender protection violates and obligation made by licensing of justice to legal counsel. The biggest issue. While a close second a person violates a basic principle of law by knowingly concealing their gender from a public. We also understand that a person who is born with two genders is legally handicapper in some very specific and limited ways.

MayCaesar

@piloteer

You must be joking... North Koreans are forced to regularly watch mass shootings, as in public executions, since the age of 12. One mass shooting per several months per country of 300+ million people is so statistically insignificant, it is not worth mentioning. Try one mass shooting per month in each village, sometimes involving your relatives. Or living on a bowl of rotten rice a week for years - try that.
My description of oppression corresponds to the meaning of the word that has been used for centuries. People nowadays are adept at redefining English words, but I am not going to play that game. You are not oppressed by being sent to jail over not paying taxes for 8 years straight; you are oppressed by being sent to a labor camp over mispronouncing the Great Leader's official title.

Yes, it was the government. Which is exactly my point: the government should not interfere in this business. Tackling identity politics issues with identity politics is ridiculous, and the consequences of such approach are obvious everywhere it has been tried. Just like one does not extinguish fire by setting more things on fire, one does not fix discrimination by race by introducing law based on race.

piloteer

@MayCaesar

When American citizens who pay the same taxes as everyone else are barred from pubic places or treated as second class citizens, it is oppression, and those circumstances are considered by definition to be oppression, and nowhere in the definition of oppression does it mention you as being the sole proprietor of what the true meaning of oppression is. When American citizens are targeted by law enforcement and made to have longer prison sentences than other members of society, it is also oppression by definition. When those tactics of oppression are based on the identity of an entire portion of society, and the oppression is based on the traits associated with their identity, then that's oppression based on identity. When the oppression is handed down by the government, then that's oppression based on identity politics. If the government needs to address that oppression because the vast majority of society opposes it, then that government will have no choice but to identify the discriminatory practices, and they would not be able to so without using the identity of the population and the traits associated with their identity.

 The United States had a free market system in place, but that system did nothing to address the fact that there was a large portion of the population who were treated as second class citizens. It took a social movement to address some of the oppressive policies to do that, and just because people are executed in public in North Korea or Saudi Arabia, that doesn't act as a good reason to let any form of oppression take place in the United States.

 The prison stats don't lie. More people are put into prison in the US than in any other country on earth. The stats on the effectiveness of imprisonment don't lie either, and it's been thoroughly proven that imprisonment is ineffective at rehabilitating people who commit crime, but it's highly effective at creating a criminal culture that only breeds repeat offenders, and minorities suffer greater from this more so than white Americans.

The victims are to blame, not the perpetrators. If the North Koreans are executed for simply watching a t.v. show made in South Korea, then either the North Koreans don't deserve the freedom to watch South Korean t.v. shows, or they want to be forced to not be allowed to watch those shows, and they want to be forced to be made to eat rotten rice. Either way, they deserve it. If the people of the United States allow a system where portions of society are made to be second class citizens, and that system is based on the identity of the second class citizens, then it is the people of the United States alone who will deserve that form of oppression. Letting people stand in the way of stopping that oppression is the same useless tactics used by the Germans to let the nazis decimate their country, and the same tactics used by the North Koreans. It seems there are some people in the United States who have a sense of responsibility and they work to expose and address oppression where it occurs, and if they fail, they deserve what will happen to them. 

                   

MayCaesar

@piloteer

Yet this is not what this Civil Rights act is about. It is about private companies not being allowed to discriminate by race; the government itself could stop discrimination by just making a conscious choice not to discriminate, but governments never have people's best interest in mind. This act, just like any other law ever implemented by the government, only caters for the governmental interests.

The US has a very effective law enforcement system in place, and few people can get away with crimes. The US also has higher crime rates than most other developed countries. It is no surprise that, as a result, the incarceration rate is the highest in the world. It is a sad state of affairs, but does not indicate any "oppression" in itself.

By your own logic (with which I personally strongly disagree with), Blacks were to blame in 60-s for their predicament, and deserved everything they got. Hence the governmental action was not warranted. How does this align with everything else you said in this thread?
What is this collectivist thinking anyway? How can people be collectively to blame? Is every single North Korean, including those dying trying to cross the border with South Korea, to blame for their predicament? That is an obnoxious argument. Am I also to blame for having been born in Soviet Union, for example?

piloteer

@MayCaesar

The restrictions on business is not the only part of the civil rights act. It also bans unequal application of voter registration. It makes segregation of schools illegal. It gives all citizens equal access to all public places. It also protected peacful protesters rights of freedom of assembly and freedom of speech without the threat of police brutality. Those measures are liberties that were supposed to be allotted to all American citizens, but were not upheld by local authorities. The law made it possible for the attorney General to enter into lawsuits that challenged local authorities who did not abide by the constitution. For that aspect of the civil rights act to be enacted, there needed to be some way to address the identity politics that were being used as a tool of oppression. The only way that could suffice as a valid means of addressing that particular form of oppression was to point out the identity the oppression was based on and make it illegal. I agree with you when it comes to taking away the rights of private business owners, but that's not the true topic of our discussion. Our discussion is centered around how to make oppression that is based on identity illegal without resorting to the identity itself, and in the end, there would have been no effective manner of doing so without addressing the identity itself, because the oppression was based on identity.

You are obviously not to blame for being born in the Soviet Union, just as no individual can be blamed for where they were born. But, if minorities in American do not stand up for the injustice that plagues them in the American justice system that is handed down by law enforcement, the judiciary system, and the penal system, then they will not overcome that oppression. If they do not overcome that oppression, they may as well get busy getting used to it, which is just the same as deserving it. If those injustices can be used on any portion of society, it makes it much more likely for it to be used on all portions of society. Maybe you think this a collectivist argument, but Ayn Rand would tend to disagree with your point of view because she believed it was a societies responsibility to shape their policies, and if they let ruthless gangs (dictators) gain control of their society and suppress their very right to exist, then it is that society who is guilty for allowing that. Individuals who act contrary to oppressive policies cannot be blamed for that oppression, but whole societies that do nothing about it and act as cogs in the oppressive machine simply out of fear of reprisal can certainly be blamed, because it is they who are acting in accordance with the oppression. They are the machine, the ruling class only created the machine and keep it maintained, but it is the people who are the machine.  

MayCaesar

@piloteer

I disagree. All the changes you have described required merely repeal of all laws addressing discriminated categories and employing the constitutional idea prescribing equal treatment to all individuals. The individual should be the target of all laws, not groups of people based on some arbitrary categories. Identities never need to be involved in any way.

Well, personally I do not think in terms of "deserve" or "blame". Ayn Rand's point was that it is responsibility of every individual to make the best out of their situation and to stand up for themselves. She rejected categories such as "collective responsibility" and, instead, put all the responsibility on the single individual. Nobody can be held responsible for failings of other people, but everybody can be held responsible for not being able to adapt to the situation. A North Korean person is not responsible for the situation in North Korea, but they are responsible for finding a way out of their predicament - and many do, by partaking in a very risky escape journey.
People often mistakenly interpret her views as vilification of the unfortunate and praise of the fortunate. Yet her views had nothing to do with that. Rather, she vilified the unfortunate who were content with their situation, praised the fortunate who became such through hard work. A poor person is not to blame for their predicament; however, a poor person who does not go out of their way to not be poor is.

John_C_87

@ MayCaesar

There is an issue with the idea of principle in that order of under constitution, all people as a united state are not to be treated equal the objective is the more perfect union of description as clear. It is constitution principle which is to be the method as united state to establish independence.

@ piloteer

Segregation of schools is a far more complex issue than color or race alone and the ignorance of the general welfare of two groups neglecting a United State Constitutional duty will not be fulfilling a duty when instruction is not clear. That neglect of the past work continues today when addressed in a realistic Presidential state of the union.

@Both

LGBT are in basic principle men and woman seeking private partnership. Instead of titling their own companies accordingly, to which they and they alone had the responsibility.  They seek a franchise title based on a likelihood of creation of citizen ship knowingly constitutional different than their own. It is the likelihood of new born which required the witnessing of Marriage. The lawyer, or lawyer's who started the ground work for civil lawsuit had been conducting a malpractice in desperation. Though noble as effort it was and is still misguided as it worked against witnesses within the general welfare of law and justice.

Two men who are seen residing in one resident are simply Binivir, simply in this matter means basic principle that is all needed to divide their belongings in civil disagreements before court.

Two woman who are seen residing in one resident are simply Binimulier, the more detail understandings to child birth can have woman broken down constitutional even more by a witness labeling them as UnosMulier. This demonstrating they are of age to create new born child in many ways with many costs to the general welfare.