Sayonara

What do you mean, "what"? If you have evidence that refutes that the universe is expanding, present it.

Analogies followed by a quote. That is certainly a novel approach which we have never seen before.

You are wrong. Denying certain groups of people access to services DOES do immediate and direct harm which can be observed, as well as long term and indirect damage to the individual and the community. Your lack of imagination in considering what that might be, or lack of perceptiveness in witnessing it first hand, is entirely beside the point. All you have there is an argument from ignorance. Consider this: if discrimination in services and business does no harm, why is it legislated against? Do you think nobody has had this conversation before? Do you think it is just there to "restrict freedom" or police your thoughts? I don't see what the relevance is of your actions in your home as far as the legislation against discrimination by service providers goes. (Unless of course you run a business from home and have some kind of raging ~ism.) That has nothing to do with the thread whatsoever and is not a requirement of the law we are discussing. I think you might be getting a bit muddled up with the issues in the OP and your own personal beliefs. "A winner" is a colloquialism for a good, solid, internally consistent idea. The winning part is not meant to imply popularity but stability. Sorry, I should not have assumed you would know this.

I am not sure what you mean. Their schedule is pretty much the same as everyone else's - first half of season, sweeps, second half of season. In fact you could say their schedule is better, because they have had at least two sets of webisodes between seasons, as well as Razor: Flashback.

Right, but putting up a sign outside your shop that says "no blacks or gays pls k thx" doesn't do any direct damage which can be "objectively interpreted and observed". I don't think you are onto a winner here.

It's not a scam, it's because of the writers' strike, which has affected almost every major show going. To Pete, the second half of season 4 finishes the series, and it is out in February.

Why stop at anti-discrimination laws? Some people might feel their freedom to stab customers in the eye is being restricted.

If you use the "log out" link, I think it may delete the cookie. The answer is to use "remember me" and close the tab/window without logging out when you leave the site.

Yes, but if it's a shared computer that is hardly convenient. The session length of a few minutes is ridiculous and we need to change it.

So that it remembers you. The session time could do with being increased, to be fair.

I suggest that if you don't like or use facebook, then this is not the thread for you. But I will say that the comments about non-existent privacy basically represent an argument from ignorance. You simply aren't using the site correctly. And frankly I'd rather have Facebook track my buying habits than all the other websites which I use but which are not high-profile enough to be targeted by a software company which has a stake in showing how super they are.

Except that dictionaries are not technical resources, and will usually give common usage meanings for words, rather than the precise scientific meaning which is used within the particular discipline that the paper is intended for. Which completely defeats your aims. I think you might want to look up "proof".

Very weird If you do not accept cookies from this site, it can't remember you. Make sure SFN is not on your cookie block list or cookie "delete when I close the browser" list. If you have a "keep cookies" list, put SFN on it.

If DH does not want to publicise his details, that is his choice. I somehow doubt you will be getting his address. Incidentally he has the user title "Physics Expert" because he has been given it by the forum administrators to identify him as a Resident Expert specialising in physics. A user title on an internet forum is not actually a summary of all that a person sees themselves as, strangely enough.

Major deja vu. Didn't we already have a thread about the saltwater bit?

I'm curious to know if this results in an appreciably longer or shorter text...?

Behold my orange mighty wheat t-shirt of joy.

I'm so super, super serial you guys.

Mmm, pie. In the UK it is kind of confusing, because you have the National Health Service which is centrally funded and controlled, but which is administered and run as a business, and contracted out quite a lot if you scrutinise it closely enough. UK doctors are answerable to the General Medical Council wherever they go astray (ignoring the consequences of criminal offences, that is. In that case they are of course answerable to the courts). Historically though Brits have been experts at complaining about service levels so that sort of balances the confusion. The UK system is a sort of self-correcting one, in that the only people you would probably want to refuse service (which mostly only happens for safety reasons afaik) are the sort who will refuse treatment anyway and 'escape', e.g. violent drunks. Perhaps what the legislation is trying to promote is a social model whereby you are not simply a civil servant because you are administered by the state, but that providing any kind of regulated service to society makes the practitioner a kind of "civil servant" by default. Doctors who were licensed (in the US) or registered (in the UK) when the legislation came in will of course have a teething period which may be uncomfortable to them, depending on their views and their patients. This is unfortunate for them but it's no different to any of the concessions, compromises, or sacrifices that any other sector of society has learnt to work around with other changes in legislation that were intended to benefit everyone as a whole. For those expecting to enter the medical profession, it's just one more aspect for them to mull over when they are considering what career path will suit them. Provision of an equitable service works on many levels (individuals, local working practises, corporate approaches, industry regulations, and legislation). But it all starts with the individuals themselves, who may already understand that it is unfair and unprofessional to provide different levels of service to different kinds of people. I find the idea of doctors making personally-subscribed religious scripture a part of their professional practise to be a disturbing one, and if it takes legislation to make the point that it's not really on at all, then good. Crack on! In this particular example, it's not as if the woman asked the staff to become unmarried lesbian mothers themselves. She simply asked to be artificially inseminated. You have to question the conviction behind the refusals. Do the staff treat unmarried mothers with that procedure? Do they not think that they may be chastened in heaven for not stoning enough homosexuals to death? The provisions of scripture are not a sound basis for prescribing medical service levels, elective procedure or not. Well, yes, I agree the doctors have a valid concern. Those who are affected have been somewhat backed into a corner by the law. But they are only in this position because of beliefs that they hold, as opposed to the people they are (it's easier to admit that god doesn't want single parents to go to hell than it is to stop being a lesbian). Also, they do have a raft of options available to them for coping, such as reconsidering those specific beliefs which lead to the dilemma, how they integrate those beliefs into their working practises, whether or not they should even be doing that, and so on. The lesbian who wants to bear a child is not so fortunate, and she is not responsible for the doctor's dilemma. A middle ground might be a system whereby doctors maintain a list of local alternatives to whom the patient can be referred to where there is a conflict of interests. It should be reasonably straightforward for a doctor to predict the kind of conflicts which might come up in their line of work, and locate colleagues nearby who won't have the same problems. I know this did actually happen in the quoted article, and the woman still sued, but that's litigious societies for you. It should have been "refer", not "refuse.... but also refer". Incidentally, there was a similar outcry from Catholic adoption agencies when the Equality Act was introduced to the UK. In a nutshell, the legislation prohibited service provision from being withheld on the basis of discrimination, and the Catholic adoption agencies made the claim that they would have to close if refusing to allow gay couples to adopt meant that an agency was in breach of the law (they completely ignored the possibility of simply asking prospective adoptive gay couples if they wouldn't mind going to another agency, perhaps one from this list?). After a long debate which Tony Blair milked and milked for all the crowd-pleasing he could, parliament ruled against the agencies. This quote very aptly summarises the principle I have been trying to get across: Part of me wants this to be a new thread and part of me shouts "no, it's the same argument!"

That was, in fact, the thrust of my comment, and I'm sorry you interpreted it as some kind of argument. To be fair, I have not at any point suggested that the topic does not merit serious discussion. I will leave it to you to change the subject line as you see fit. I think that if we go in this direction, we are simply exchanging one grey area for another. Specifically, we are pushing the "who decides which beliefs provide a valid objection?" grey area aside in favour of the "which procedures are emergencies and which are not?" grey area. Although I can see the common sense aspect of the exchange. Well, that's not really true. Neighbour disputes are a good example. If you wish to keep this a USA-only discussion then I can't really comment on specific duties (of which investigation is simply one example), but I don't for one second believe police officers never provide a service to the public in America. Yes, but do the American armed forces just say "oh, okay" every single time someone cites personal belief as a reason for not following lawful orders? No, of course they don't. Only under the sort of circumstances which, in the civilian analogue, would be the basis of defence in the court case of (for example) the doctor from that article. This is something I was considering while going to the shops to purchase pie, and I will comment on it when I have eaten pie. You misunderstand why I used that word. I do not mean to say that an elective procedure is "critical"; I mean to say that the delivery of medical services is a critical element of a society that functions well. Deregulating service delivery is a sure-fire way to create inequity. I differentiate between a right being denied and a right not existing. But I acknowledge this is a difficult moral issue rather than being related directly to the legislative topic of the thread. The legislation is not there to dictate morality, it is there to protect service users from being subjected to any given practitioner's personal belief system. I really don't see how you can value the doctor's "freedom to choose" above the customer's right to not have his values imposed on them. The customer has after all come for insemination, not indoctrination. Be mindful also that the doctor is not being denied a choice; he has made his choice already, and that's WHY this problem exists. Change it to "The people seeking access to a service, however, do have a right to be treated equally and without arbitrary obstacles due to personal belief". I don't think it loses any of its resonance.

Manbearpig!

Actually, for that to be a strawman, I'd have to be claiming it was your argument. Clearly I did no such thing; what I did was make a comment about the tone of your post, which I think is borne out by... well... the tone of your post. My argument was actually in the rest of my post, which you seem to have chosen not to acknowledge. Yes, and his work includes doing things he doesn't necessarily like. However, this law has come about because it is invalid to put "insemination of a lesbian" and "insemination of a straight woman" into separate boxes. In medical terms they are both simply the procedure of "insemination", and the doctor introducing the spurious discriminatory element of the patient's sexual preference is not an attribute, specification, or requirement of the procedure. It's something personal and unwarranted that he is tacking on to the service which he provides, and it conflicts with the aims of the service itself. Really? So where do you stand on police officers who don't particularly want to conduct investigations on behalf of people who are known to them as being more on the supply side of crime? Do you think they should have the option to just walk away as well? Isn't that just part of what being a professional is all about? Doing your job even though you might not like it? And being realistic, jail is only going to be the punishment for people who are outrageously flaunting the law, not everyone who falls slightly foul of it. Civil liberties... hah. Let's imagine an armed force or a government agency or an emergency service in which each individual just decides whether or not they want to do their job on a day to day basis according to some arbitrary belief that they personally hold. That is the point though: the legislation is not "ignoring" the doctors' and pharmacists' rights to refuse service because of their own beliefs. It is saying that they do not have that right. Which is exactly how critical professional services like medicine SHOULD be provided. Personally, I'd like to see how you would have responded to that article if the word "lesbian" was replaced by "black", and the words "religious objection" were replaced by "flaming racism".

Yes, instead of characterising doctors as being evil gay-haters, let's characterise lesbians as being unreasonable gold-diggers. Think that sort of thing is perhaps better off on your blog, Pangloss. So what if it was elective? The law is there to prevent people acting in a professional capacity from denying service because of personal beliefs that have nothing to do with that service. We have the same law (well, virtually) in the UK. See if you can find any other laws pertaining to service provision that run along the lines of "It's unlawful to deny service on the basis of X, unless, y'know, you don't really think it's that urgent the customer gets that service, or... like... if there's somewhere else they could for it go within oooh say 50km." It has nothing whatsoever to do with the doctor's feelings, either. When you act in a professional capacity, you hang your personal life and your prejudices at the door. That is part of what being "professional" is all about, and the fact that some people need it legislating into them is just sad, not license to acknowledge it as the norm.