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In reading this thread, I am struck by the fact that so many so-called conservatives would support federal legislation outlawing discrimination on private property by private parties.

I (and I believe most people) condemn discrimination based on arbitrary characteristics such as race, gender, etc. because I believe it is morally wrong and destructive, both to those who practice it and to those against whom it is practiced, and, whether I am selling a home, running a business or hiring an employee...practicing discrimination is economically stupid.

Yet for all of those reasons that we condemn discrimination, one would assume that most recognize that legal prohibitions on it would be unnecessary.

Yet so many people on here take what I see as a paternalistic view that we must outlaw private discrimination (and it is private...locating your home or business on a public street or selling to the public does not make one a public entity...which is why the Civil Rights Act and related federal legsilation was based on the Commerce Clause and not the 14th Amendment (which would have authorized Congressional legislation prohibiting discrimination by states... Congess recognized that they were regulating private property and private conduct by non-state actors). I have to assume that these people:

(1) have a very low opinion of their fellow Americans and believe that, unless discrimination is legally prohibited, it will thrive...either because substantial numbers of their fellow Americans are incapable of seeing the immorality of discrimination (in which case, it must be asked...is this whole representative government thing really capable of working?) OR because they believe their fellow Americans are immoral...OR

(2) because they themselves believe that the downside to practicing discrimination will not outweigh any benefits people derive from it and therefore, again, discrimination will thrive

You're missing it completely.

The race issue was not necessary here. Private property is not the subject, either. This company engaged in a breach of contract. That should be condemned. Racism and private property rights are really outside the purview of this case, no matter what the company settled the case over.

These family members paid their own money wilfully, and this company accepted their money. Yet the company would not allow access to all aminities that the family paid for? This company doesn't have a leg to stand on, do they?

Irontank, are you a constitutional originalist?

Does the original intent of the drafters of the Constitution count a lot for you?

Good!

Go and read the legislative debates of the 1860s, when the three amendments to the Constitution which ended slavery and extended civil rights to blacks were passed. Go and read the Civil Rights Act of 1866, passed by the same people who debated the amendments, and all for the same reasons.

They passed a private right of action in federal court against racial discrimination. That was, indeed, the original intent of the drafters of those amendments, and those amendments were duly adopted by the states. Those amendments, and the reasons for them, therefore stand on identical ground as the Federalist Papers, the Bill of Rights, and the rest of the Constitution.

The purpose of those laws was to end slavery, and the badges and incidents of slavery, to make black people equal to white people in every way. That was the intent, that is what the Congressmen and state legislators who enacted those three amendments debated, and passed.

It was the Supreme Court that, quite maliciously, reversed all of that, paring it back, reducing the right of action. Because the Supreme Court was as activist - to promote racism in the late 1800s - as it has been in our day. The laws were overturned, or abridged, and three amendments to the Constitution were ignored.

Private property rights did not extend to the right to discriminate against black people in business, that is perfectly clear, painfully clear, from the "Federalist Papers" of the 1860s, the Congressional Record of the debates over those amendments and the 1866 Civil Rights Act.

If one is an originalist, one has to accept that the Constitution was duly amended with the INTENT of making segregation and discrimination illegal. Because a bunch of racist bastards in this country wanted to continue to beat blacks down, they used the judiciary to block, and then relied on local democracy to supplant the original intent of the Constitution, as amended thrice in the 1860s.

Under the Constitution, as intended, there does not exist a private property right to discriminate against black people in business. That was totally and irrevocably removed by the 13th Amendment, and the 14th, and the 15th.

That the Supreme Court wrote the right back in there, so that the Supreme Court, a hundred years later, had to dig it all back out...by relying on the paltry Commerce Clause (instead of the express amendments designed to address this thing), is not to the court's credit. The reason there had to be a Brown v. Board of Education was because the Supreme Court gutted the Constitution in 1873 and in 1896, successively overthrowing the original, anti-racist intent of the Constitution, as amended.

Property rights ceased to have constitutional standing as a basis for discrimination based on race with 1865, with the 13th Amendment.