Note: When Mike Pence signed Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act on March 27, 2015, the news made the rounds in my Facebook circle, and I participated in a couple of threads on the topic. This short comment echoes some of the main points I had made a few days earlier in a longer discussion. (DL, June 14, 2023).
I had this discussion earlier on another thread, and I’ll repost some of what I said here:
I subscribe to the concept of the social contract. As members of a freely self-governing society, we undertake certain commitments to one another. In essence, we willingly agree to give up some of our autonomy in exchange for the benefits and protections of combined effort.
In regards to the public marketplace, I accept rules regarding fair and equitable trade for all in exchange for police protection, protection from unfair competitive practicies by more powerful competitors and banks, easy access to my customers and suppliers provided by the public transportation infrastructure, and (crucially) free access to the market myself regardless of my beliefs.
One reason an open marketplace is important is because it actually HELPS protect freedom of speech and freedom of thought in a self-governing society.
Without the kind of minority protections in the marketplace the Indiana law works against, minorities of all kinds (whether of race, or sexual preference, or religion, or other ideology) would have to fear exclusion from the marketplace if they spoke up or acted (or existed) in unpopular ways.
If freedom of speech is truly to be a part of a society, it’s not enough that I be free from the fear of arrest and prosecution for speaking up, I need to be free from the fear of market exclusion as well.
Thanks to minority protections, even if your customers refuse to come to YOU for business, they can’t refuse you coming to THEM. And perhaps even more importantly, because they CAN’T refuse you, they themselves can’t suffer recriminations for doing business with you. Because that’s what would really shut down the market for unpopular minorities. Even somebody otherwise willing to do business with you would be afraid to do so because they might be tainted in the popular view by association with you. (The mind fills with examples from the bad old days.)
This is a vital principle of freedom. I am free in how I choose to spend my dollars and may filter my options based on my ideology as I choose, but the market is freely open to all, which means I am free to SPEND, but also to SPEAK.
The alternative is fearful:
If my business or corporation can refuse to serve gays and lesbians on the basis of conscience and the law is consistently applied, what’s to keep the power company from refusing to service a bigot like me for the same reason?