Anti-Gay Hotels Told To Impose A Sex Ban
Yet another load of interfering rubbish from this government:
“Muslim or Christian guest house owners who refuse to accept homosexual couples must impose a “sleeping together ban” on all other guests, the Government says.
As the holiday season gets under way, Meg Munn, a junior minister, has emphasised that it is illegal to allow married couples to share a room at a guest house or hotel while not allowing homosexuals the same right.
If gays are turned away, the only way a Christian or Muslim guest house owner can lawfully stay in business is if he or she offers single bedrooms to all guests - straight or gay.” (The Telegraph)
To start with, I don’t think that hotels or guest houses are at all right to refuse their services to gay couples. But this is a really stupid idea. To say that you won’t let a gay couple share a room is as bad to refuse to let a black couple do the same. It is bigotry. But for the government to say that “either you let gay couples share a room, or no-one” is just absurd.
Giles Fraser, the vicar of Putney and a leading Church of England liberal, said:
“It is nonsense for the Government to allow any loopholes for religious homophobia… Bigotry is bigotry whether it’s dressed up in the language of faith or not.”
This is indeed true - bigotry is bigotry, whether or not based on religion. But I think the demand for what amounts to a sex ban is ridiculous, and taking government interfering to yet another level.
Note: I’m not supporting hotels who refuse to rent rooms to gay couples, but I don’t think that it is the government’s job to force them to do so or go out of business. Society can, and should, do that by avoiding such hotels and guest houses.
Source: The Telegraph
This entry is filed under Absurdity, Discrimination, Interference, Nanny State, Society, The Market. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Speaking as a gay man I nevertheless agree with you that the notion of trying to enforce the law by declaring that a refusal to rent a room to a gay couple means that mixed-gender couples can’t be rented rooms either sounds pretty ridiculous. However, the idea that doing nothing will cause the vast bulk of civically-minded patrons who wish to hire a room to boycott hotels or guest houses which impose a gay ban and so force them out of business by a sort of ’social stigma’, rather than by legal fiat because of their refusal to follow the law, is equally unlikely to work (I hesistate to call your idea ‘ridiculous’).
There are many other laws which, when they were first introduced, were similarly unpopular with segments of the population. For example if, today, a government were to allow hotels or guest houses to choose not to rent rooms to ‘black’ guests then I am sure, unpleasant as it is to contemplate, there would be a ready market for such establishments and they would not suffer to the extent of forcing them out of business - there would be sufficient ‘white’ people willing to give them their business on this basis, whether or not they were personally supportive of the decision to exclude ‘black’ people.
In summary, the law must apply to all. Whether certain laws should have been passed is a separate matter, but once they have then they should be univarsally respected and enforced.
I should have added that this new law cuts both ways; there are hitherto exclusively ‘gay’ (or ‘lesbian’) establishments which are I suppose now technically obliged to rent rooms or provide services to mixed-gender couples who choose to visit, although whether your average heterosexual couple would wish to patronise some of the more ‘exotic’ gay establishments out there is probably unlikely. But a number of predominantly ‘gay’ hotels are just as full of chintz and pot pourri as any ‘normal’ hotel, so other than inconveniencing people who wish to have their own separate space I would just as soon take myself to a place where I was actually welcome.
I thought/think it was short-sighted of some gay activists a few years ago to make an issue of the policies of the ‘Sandals’ company which wanted ‘couples only’ and those couples had to be mixed-sex couples - would I really wish to go to such a place? Not in a million years!