Anti-Discrimination Laws or the Culture of Freedom?

"It’s still safe to discriminate against gays in Maryland," Barton Aronson writes deploringly regarding Maryland's forthcoming referendum on the Anti-Discrimination Act. The proposed law criminalizes employment, housing, and public accommodation discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

The Anti-Discrimination Act is nothing novel, simply the logical extension of current anti-discrimination policy. If racial, religious, or gender discrimination may be criminalized, there's nothing peculiar about adding sexual orientation to the verboten class. (Many Congressmen would like to nationalize the addition; see the proposed Employment Non-Discrimination Act.)

Under America's federal republican system, the people of Maryland (not Congress) reserve the power to enact a law criminalizing discrimination against homosexuals. Whether this is wise is another matter.

The Maryland referendum is something of a local issue for me. I live about an hour from Miami-Dade County in Florida and recently joined WWFE-AM 670 in Miami to co-host a new program.

In 1998, the Miami-Dade County Commission amended its "Human Rights Ordinance" to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in housing, employment, public accommodations, and financing. (The city of Miami Beach passed a similar ordinance in 1992.) Calling this amendment a "Human Rights Ordinance" is an oxymoron indicative of how deeply leftist ideology has skewed American liberty.

Murray Rothbard notes in Power and Market, "[N]ot only are property rights also human rights, but in the profoundest sense there are no rights but property rights." Human rights therefore accrue to a proprietor or homeowner, one of these being the right to employ or rent on any basis he chooses. After all, his business or home is presumably his.

Does this mean an employer may refuse to hire Hare Krishnas, Hondurans, or homosexuals? Absolutely. Does this mean a homeowner may refuse to rent a dwelling to Muslims, Mongolians, or midgets? Absolutely. (I use "may" normatively, not descriptively. It is of course currently illegal to refuse to hire or rent to someone on these criteria.) There is no aggression in any of this, only proprietary choice.

An anti-discrimination law guts proprietary rights and criminalizes non-criminal conduct. Akin to laws criminalizing sodomy or consumption of certain narcotics, an anti-discrimination law implies a mandate for government to prohibit any kind of discrimination. (It would be unsurprising for there to one day be a "creed" addition to Title VII or the Fair Housing Act making it criminal to have a "No Communists" hiring or rental policy.)

A "Human Rights Ordinance" that violates property rights is like a cheerleader for Fidel Castro who esteems Ludwig von Mises: It just doesn't work. Whereas the latter is only an incoherent individual, the former invades the liberty of all.

Aronson makes the valid and important point that "anti-discrimination laws have cultural consequences." Indeed, they corrode the culture of freedom and the liberal institutions underpinning it. As society acclimates to their usurpations, freedom is concurrently attenuated.

The culture of freedom demands the defeat of Maryland's Anti-Discrimination Act – for starters.

August 4, 2001

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