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by ryandrake 1254 days ago
What counts as "abuse"? Besides those enumerated special reasons like ethnicity, sex, religion, disability, you can ban someone from your business for ANY reason or even no reason. If the business owner doesn't like green shirts, he can ban you for wearing a green shirt. Is this abuse? If the business owner doesn't like how you smell, he can ban you. Abuse? They can even make a mistake and ban the wrong person. Is that abuse?
2 comments

I don't think it can be the same definition for every business. If it's something like a restaurant where the person can go to hundreds of other competitors, I think banning for any reason is ok. If it's large venue where there's only one, or if those restaurants band together to ban a person from the whole class of business, I don't 100% agree with it being unrestricted.

What if all the hospitals are private like in the US and they all share the same ban list? Should they be able to ban you for wearing a green shirt?

Many US hospitals are owned by government entities. Patient access to all hospitals including privately owned ones is controlled by the EMTALA law. That law doesn't apply to other types of businesses.

https://www.cms.gov/regulations-and-guidance/legislation/emt...

as another comment points out, that is not the case everywhere, and people citing such "dilemmas" often fail to consider whether that is a desirable thing at all.

why should you be able to kick out all patrons who wear green shirts? is that not against the spirit of offering a public accommodation?

even if your goal is to enforce a dress code, surely that can be done in a "content-neutral" manner similar to the "time, manner, place" regulations.

similarly to the "constitutional fetishism" in the US, where people dig in their heels defending really awful features and design goals of the system, people often really fail to stop and consider the difference between the way the system is and the way it ought to be. Being banned from public society en-masse by a privately-operated "social credit" system is pretty horrible even if it's perfectly legal under the current law!

but it wasn't feasible to do that en-masse back in the 1700s, so nobody wrote a law preventing it, just like one cop could watch traffic in 1780 means that it's legally fine to build a massive database recording everyone's movements in the 2020s...