The issue is whether a resturant is a public venue or conveyance. Can a member of the public choose another bus line or find another ball park right field to sit in? Hardly. Therefore some regulation of conduct of all has some precedent. But he dang sure can go to another restaurant, bar, or private business to trade.
That’s a tolerable arrangement, I’d say, but if the community disagrees and works through the chosen framework of representative democracy to establish other arrangements, who’s arrangement should prevail -- mine or the community’s? I can propose my arrangement in the political marketplace and work toward its adoption, but if another arrangement prevails I will respect it or risk punishment for violating it.
As the fundament of our chosen system resides the Constitution. But who decides what the Constitution means and how it is to be applied in any particular dispute? Each decides for himself? Let the lawyers decide? Recognize the “superior intelligence” of one or a few and let them decide? The Constitution itself did not resolve those questions. In Marbury v. Madison the Supreme Court declared its power to decide what the Constitution means and the two other branches of government accepted that, as did the citizenry. That settled the matter and, ever since, the Supreme Court has continued to decide constitutional disputes -- sometimes in ways that I liked, sometimes in ways that I didn’t. It is not mere defiance for a person to insist that he does not care what the process says, he will decide for himself what the Constitution means. It is a challenge to the fundamental framework of the community. Those who reject the process can be heard as a matter of right, but the community will resist, as it has done, their efforts to destroy that process and set themselves up as final authority.
Ochlocracy. Government by the mob. Comrade.
Each of those decisions defines more or less and restricts more or less uses of all property, private or public, and individual conduct, private or public.
No group of people can rightfully collude to restrict or deny individual rights, comrade Whilom.
You and Hillary, cut from the same cloth. Red cloth.
Small and locally do have sensible definitions. Only obfuscation or nominalism will make those meanings vanish and the best then be undiscoverable. We are conditioned by our modern liberal education to ignore meaning and to make all things equal and open to individual judgement. Such a virtueless look at the world is a curse of modernity.
You stress "representative democracy" and for me that is a key in where we differ. It, again, is a lie sold to us as modernity substituting for history. The founders never used the word "democracy" in our constitution and the ommission was entirely intentional and providential.
Deliberative Representation is what we have in the bulk of the offices that serve use under our State and Federal Governments. Read Burke's Speech to the Electors at Bristol for a clear understanding of that convention as I mean it. We do not have Pliebisitory Delegates and we darn sure were never meant to have a "democracy". Our Deliberative Representatives were chosen by diverse means, some of which were elective and therefore democratic in process as a broad part of it was participatory. This holds true for appointed roles as well, because the appointor is often elected.
Democracy, especially egalitarian, implies that my desires of the moment are to somehow make their way into the process and there was nothing further from the founders' intent. But, why was that?
It was to keep the tyranny of the majority in check. Sure Numbers matters and deciedes things. But only those Numbers and by those processes framed in the diverse process of our constitutions. Thereby the Majority is kept from (1) violating by whim of the moment, (2) intemperence, (3) the will of demogogues, (4)violating prescriptive principle honored from time immemorial (as opposed to abstract rights), and (5)never being given the ability to announce any One decision, of merely 51%, as the ultimate public will.
While conservatives often believe in an Enduring Moral Order, an Order for the Soul and an Order for the State, Government itself is a narrow tool often negative that is not the perfect vessel for all that Order. Culture and social society itself must carry the bulk of that Order; not the negative and blunt tool of government.
The framework of which you speak is actually meant to be an absence of most authority, not the counterpoint between an all encompassing Process or Authority (or Anarchic lack thereof).
In your second paragraph, you again put Democracy in a primacy where it doesn't belong. But even more, you make the same mistake of utilitarian primacy that Sowell criticizes modern liberals and libertarians for in establishing the greatest good, or abstract rights, as a judge or value to measure by.
In a battle on abstract rights the right of the one always gives way to the rights of the many. Speech or something similar, always trumps property says Sowell ( See A Conflict of Visions). We weren't given a governmental structure to lay on that much control over us.
In your third paragraph, I agree the the citizen must submit to just and proper authority. But he also must resist and fight improper authority of the acquisitive nature of those in authority will overturn his society. So if I agree that Judges Interpret as well as Adjudicate, I will always make that resistance when they Legislate rather than Interpret. So you see that we are once again back to the plain meaning of Words.
When we confuse the Animating Principles of our Revolution with the Constitution, when we get filled with the metaphysical nonsense of what Hayek calls Rationalist Totalitarian Democracy, why then our land is no longer the land of liberty.
And besides, a valued customer and I, discussing a book in my own future book store, can't each smoke our pipes fired with virgina and burley. My countryman, if you wish to give community its proper due, go no further than Nisbet.