Homosexuality potentially prevents the propagation of the human race and is therefore a threat to its survival

Homosexuals do not share the same values as straight society and are a threat to social order

Homosexuals are responsible for the spread of HIV

Homosexuals could “corrupt” the youth of the country and turn them all gay

Homosexuality is “unnatural” and should be discouraged

If all those fail the mere fact that gays are “different” is enough to elicit a negative reaction in a large number of people

All are spurious right wing arguments and all can be easily countered ( apart from the first possibly) but that does not stop people holding such beliefs. How much gay bashing (verbal and physical) do you think is comitted by bible carrying christains and how much by atheist chavs ??

Not if they have considered things rationally.

For an atheist to be morally opposed to homosexuality, in general, one would have to take the view that there is some element of homosexuality that is harmful, either to the individual or to others, on a broad scale – i.e. one not specific to individual circumstances.

It is impossible to frame an objective and rational argument that leads to the conclusion that homosexuality is harmful (and therefore morally wrong) without relying either on a negative, irrational, belief about the nature of homosexuality, basing one’s notion of harm on external prejudice or making use of extreme and unrealistic context for your argument.

Feel free to have a go, if you like – anything you can come up with would be easily knocked over.

Option 1 – The B&B can discriminate on religious grounds, but the customer is not forced to tell the truth to the owner. The right to discriminate on religious grounds becomes mostly redundant, customers just lie about there personal lives, apart from those unlucky enough to have some physical feature that offends a certain religion.

Option 2 – Leave it up to the discretion of the B&Bs owner. B&Bs are given a license to turn away anyone they want, effectively for any reason they wanted, if it was religious or not, as long as they say “well he LOOKED a bit gay”. This abuse makes a mockery of both the law and religion

Option 3 – Leave it up to the discretion of the B&B owner, but enable customers to take legal action against the B&B for wrongful discrimination. Maybe it falls to the owner to prove the customer offends there religion in some way, The courts become a mass of petty litigation, costing the tax payer many millions, until B&Bs learn that trying to prove a customer is gay just gets you sued, and the law becomes mostly redundant as in option 1. Maybe it falls to the customer to prove he doesn’t offend the religion of the owner. No one wants to have there personal life sifted threw in a courtroom, most cannot prove they are not some kind of abomination against Christ anyway, legal action is rarely taken and B&Bs are given the same powers as if option 2 had been taken

Option 4 – In order to enter a B&B a person would be bound by law to present personal information to the owner on demand, and I don’t think I have to explain just how impractical that is, what a massive breach of basic human rights it is, how much it would cost to enforce, and considering just how many things you could do to offend a religion, the type and amount of information needed would allow for all kinds of abuse. Blackmail anyone?

And there are also much more interesting problems associated with this hypothetical B&B of religious bigotry. Would all religious beliefs be given equal protection under the law? If so what is to prevent the rise of a holy book specially tailored to allow businessmen to discriminate against whoever they want. If not, who decides which religious beliefs are legitimate in the eyes of the law, and who decides if the owner is a true believer or just using belief as a cover? You either end up undermining all religious belief by encouraging the rise of spurious cults who exist only as a vent of there members bigotry, or you give the government the power to pass judgement on the legitimacy of a religion, on who really believes, and pass laws based on the judgement.

Belief is an ill-defined concept, law needs to be a well defined, mix the two up and you get all kinds of chaos, and you probably won’t get the desired result after the dust has settled anyway.

Matt Munro – no the “no blacks” sign is not actually illegal, any more than a “not for girls” sign is. Enforcing such a rule, however, would be illegal.

…in case they are forced to accept as paying guests pedophiles, murders or rapists…

Yes, that’s right at the very bottom of the sludge at the end of slippery slope, at a point we’d never reach even if the PC-brigade and rights-lawyers passed all the laws they wanted for the next 1000 years.

If homosexuality is controversial, let’s take a more clear-cut example – should B&B’s be allowed to refuse their services to black people? Andrew Duffin’s libertarian argument that the market alone will solve the problem, strikes me as hopeless optimism, bordering on the delusional. Suppose a black man goes to a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, and is refused a bed in the only B&B. Then essentially he’s forced to sleep in the gutter because of the colour of his skin, and assuming that black people visit this village infrequently, the market will be powerless to help even in the long term, and certainly not before the sun goes down. A libertarian would argue that the right of the B&B owner to do as he wishes with his house trumps the black man’s night of cold wetness – I would disagree.

But we shouldn’t go crazy with this stuff – there is a slippery slope possible, taking differences between people which are less fundamental than race, gender, or sexuality, and goods and services which are increasingly footling. Every time the state intervenes, we should be sure that it’s worth it.

The sign is illegal (although “no dogs”, is legal, for elf and safety reasons) but “thinking it” is not. As I’ve said before, censoring what can be said does not stop people thinking, it just creates an unhealthy tension between thought and action. What we have here is a debate about a mental “no gays” sign.
Personally whether I was gay or not I would not want to give my business to an establishment which clearly had such fundamantally discrimanatory views but that is a decision I would make based on my own value judgements, and which I would not seek to impose on anyone else. I would in fact defend the owners “right” to hold them more than the perceived right of gays to stay wherever they pleased. In this situation you cannot simultanously support the rights of gay people to stay where there like and the rights of B&B owning christians not to have their beliefs offended. The “rights” debate has cancelled itself out, so the issue can only be resolved by a pragmatic aknowledgement that he is the owner and they are the guests.

“And the solution we present is: If you hold those views, do not open a B&B! If there is a chance that those godless dirty gay people might come into your home, why would you?”

Gay christians exist, but even so why not just find a different B&B ? By that logic no one should open a B&B in case they are forced to accept as paying guests pedophiles, murders or rapists – all of whom could argue they did not chose their condition and are therefore entitled to equal service ?

Have we ever been allowed to do that? On the most basic level, you have to pay tax on your business profits.

You’re right that B&B owners also pay tax, but that does not negate the fact that tax-payers money helps them to do business, and that they are protected by public laws of commerce.

I thought that private businesses actually generated tax, i.e. that they contributed to the economy rather than taking from it.

Also, S.Lock, it’s actually illegal for a business to refuse to provide goods or services on racist, homophobic, religious or gender grounds. There is some very specific legislation to this effect. If Nestle were to enforce the message on their Yorkie bars, for example, they would be breaking the law. So no, as a proprietor, you would *not* have the right.

That sounds a bit crazy to me. I had thought that we all had more freedom than that, and could make private business transactions in any way we pleased. Apparently not. As I get older it becomes increasingly clear that this is not a free country in most senses of the word “free”.

If you ran a B&B, would you refuse to let a racist stay there? If you did refuse, wouldn’t you be refusing access based on your own moral beliefs?