Darth Wedgius wrote: ↑Fri Jul 13, 2018 6:30 pm
Individual liberty is important to me, and I saw this as an opportunity to make a point about it in a way that a liberal might understand on an emotional level. I've heard more than once (from left and right, to be fair) that if you perform an economic activity A, you need to do it for any legal activity. Child brides are an exception to that for everyone I've run into.
But clearly there are way more exceptions than that, given we are currently in the midst of a controversy where people have been denying service at restaurants to members of the Drumpf administration, people wearing MAGA hats and so on.
Clearly there are a huge swath of people who would generally be called liberals who feel entitled to refuse service on the basis of a legal activity (some particular political position, affiliation or position). I am pretty sure plenty of those called conservatives have similar reactions from time to time. The most common distinction I have heard tends to be whether you are discriminating on the basis of an involuntary status (race, gender, nationality, sexual orientation etc.) versus discriminating in terms of a voluntary action (political affiliation, favourite boy band etc.). Your discrimination should be about what they do not what they are, so things are often summarized. There are of course endless disagreements about what is a status versus voluntary action and this is in part a moral distinction, some may say its greatly to someone's credit to choose to be an Englishman, others may deny you have any control over what boy band you like its just an inseparable part of your identity, so there is some comparison of X and Y going on when we make these distinctions (on this way of slicing the cantaloupe). Not sure if the distinction holds up for every case and exception.
Also, there are other factors, like how do you even know about the objectionable activity (are you spying on your customers), how tailored to the customer demands your goods or services are, how vital is your good or service, how exclusive are you (do you have the local monopoly on X) and so on.
I think its trickier than people would like to admit.
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I have no real insight into the persistence of child brides other than it is an illustration of the power of inertia in life and law. It seems like there is a really simple legislative fix for legal child marriages (ban'em). Presumably underground illegal child marriage would still be a problem..