SD State Senator: Businesses Should Have The Right To Discriminate
South Dakota State Senator Phil Jensen believes that the free market will result in businesses closing down if they discriminate, and so there is no need for laws about it. This, most likely, also means he’s against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (h/t Political Wire).
Jensen goes so far as to say that businesses should have the right to deny service based on a customer’s race or religion – whether that’s right or wrong, he says, can be fairly addressed by the free market, not the government.
“If someone was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and they were running a little bakery for instance, the majority of us would find it detestable that they refuse to serve blacks, and guess what? In a matter of weeks or so that business would shut down because no one is going to patronize them,” he said.
David Patton, president of the Black Hills Center for Equality, calls Jensen’s argument deeply flawed.
He said that the bakery used in Jensen’s example would have flourished a century ago, before the passage of civil rights legislation that helped protect African-Americans and other minority groups from discrimination.
“The free market didn’t do away with slavery,” Patton said.
