Even as someone who tends to play along with bans, this seems like a weird concept. I’m referring to those moments you walk into a club or a service one day and the people in charge say something along the lines of “you’re banned from our establishment because we learned you’re an artist that deals with controversial subject matter” or “we banned you because we heard that was you who engaged in those reckless activities that sent that one person to need care”.
We barely are able to enforce the Hague convention, so it makes me wonder what the mindset is when people try to take this on, as outside your jurisdiction, something could potentially be of any kind of context, as rules, etiquette, and protocol can differ enough between clubs and services that it’s almost as if the laws of physics can sometimes seem to differ.
One day, I witnessed a conversation between some rule enforcers and someone I know, and the suspicious rule enforcers asked why the individual so often likes to remain as low a profile as possible, and the individual responded “if I was as open about myself to everyone as everyone else is with each other, the amount of restrictions I’d have would quintuple due to the sheer amount of people who have grown a habit of hating me for no ethical reason whatsoever”, which also drags the issue of openness into the conversation.
Or… or maybe I’m wrong and/or am missing something. What’s your opinion on this practice? And what stands out to you as the last or most notable time this happened?
So, to be clear, my opinion was about what’s reasonable to do and was informed by our culture and laws. Your objection seems to be related to what should be legal, which is different and is more complicated, as the laws have to balance restricting and potentially damaging businesses with protecting people from discrimination.
From a legal perspective, IMO larger businesses should be held to much tighter standards than small businesses. I think it would be reasonable to legally require Google or Meta to have a reason to ban someone, to have to share that explanation, and to have to allow an appeal to be unbanned to be arbitrated by a third party, without “we can ban anyone for any reason” allowed as a defense.
Obviously this isn’t a reasonable thing for them to do.
If a business is discriminating against a protected class and only letting in a few “good ones,” then statistically it should be able to be shown that they ban far more people in that class than outside it.
How do you manage that, practically speaking, in a capitalist society? If a business owner thinks someone is acting suspicious and is likely to steal or break something, but they can’t ban them until they have a “valid” reason, if that person then breaks or steals something, that business owner has been damaged by the government’s policy. Is the government going to make them whole? No, of course not.
Does the reason need to be disclosed to the person being banned, or just recorded for future reference? A lot of the time people get defensive and angry when told the truth about what they did that made other people not want to deal with them. If someone’s been leering at customers, smells terrible, is loud and disruptive, or is just plain acting weird, telling them as much when you tell them they have to leave probably isn’t going to help them feel better.
Why do you think it’s okay for a business owner and their employees to be legally forced to deal with someone that makes them uncomfortable?
Do business owners just need to be able to articulate why someone discomforts them? Is someone judging whether a reason is good enough, or do you just need any reason, or is there a list of acceptable reasons? In the last case, what sorts of reasons are acceptable?
If a business can point to measurements they’ve taken showing that when Joe shows up, they lose money - either because their clients leave, don’t come back, or stop spending money - is that a good enough reason to ban Joe? What if this is just because their clients are all racist and Joe is black?
If a business bans Joe because of a particular reason and then Jim does the same thing, is the business forced to ban Jim?
The easy solution for this is to make being homeless a protected class. Homeless people need specific protections at a federal level, because they’re discriminated against by local and even state governments. That’s not the only class that needs this, either, to be clear.
That said, all of the times I’ve seen a homeless person banned from an establishment wasn’t because they were homeless, but because of some other reason. The one I remember clearest was a woman who had started talking to me and my girlfriend (at the time) while we were sitting at a table in a coffee shop. She asked us for money or food after just a couple minutes, then went to go and talk to someone else and after a few minutes was noticed by the staff and told to leave. When I asked about it, I gathered that she’d been banned because of multiple complaints from customers about her doing just that.