Lux Lucet

The latest LGBTQ attack on property rights comes to us courtesy of Rose Trevis, a transgender man – i.e. a woman posing as a man – who has filed suit against Hawleywood’s barbershop in Long Beach, California.

The suit was prompted when Trevis was refused service by the barbershop that has a policy of serving men only. “I felt very upset, I guess discriminated against,” Trevis said. Trevis has retained famed attorney Gloria Allred to represent her.

The last few years have seen an explosion of such suits. Florists, bakers, photographers and bed and breakfast owners, all going about their own business, have found themselves the targets of an aggressive, fascist, unbiblical homosexual rights movement that seeks to use the power of the state to force its agenda on everyone.

In many cases, the business owner’s Christian beliefs were the basis of the refusal of service. In others, such as the barbershop in Long Beach, no religious objection was put forth, only company policy was cited.

Some who support a business owner’s decision to refuse service to homosexual or transgender customers attempt to defend this decision on the basis of free speech, while others do so on the basis of religious liberty. Both defenses, well intentioned as they are, fail for the same reason: the issue is not one of free speech or religious liberty. This issue at hand is one of property rights. Does a business owner reserve the right to refuse service for any reason, or may a customer force him to perform a service against his will?

The law of God is clearly upholds the right of the business owner to offer or withhold service as he sees fit, “Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with my own things?” (Matthew 20:15), and until the 1964 Civil Rights Act, American law agreed.

It would be hard to overstate the enormous damage the Civil Rights Act inflicted on the institution of private property in this country. By their mistake of turning the sin of racism into a federal crime, supporters of this legislation loosed a tsunami of governmental interference in the personal business of American people, and that tsunami has taken a direction that likely none of them anticipated. The homosexual movement was not even on the public’s radar in 1964. But the mistaken logic of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the notion that it is a proper function of government to force privately owned businesses – what Title II of the Act terms “place[s] of public accommodation” – to serve those whom the owners do not wish to serve, is now being applied with a vengeance to defend the supposed “right” of LGBTQ individuals to force business owners to serve them, regardless of the owners wishes.

If John Robbins was right to call private property, “the central economic institution of civilized societies” (Ecclesiastical Megalomania, 30), and he was, then private property’s advanced state of decomposition represents a stark reminder of the ongoing collapse of the West. None of the current presidential candidates has offered a principled defense of private property. Some have even explicitly attacked it. Donald Trump, for example, was quite up front in his disdain for private property when he defended the use of eminent domain – in Trump’s case, he approved the state’s forcing one private owner to sell his property to another private owner allegedly for the public good – saying that, “eminent domain is something that you need very strongly.”

Private property means the owner can use and dispose of his goods as he wishes. And the law of God recognizes that this control applies, not just to one’s own home, but also to places of so-called public accommodation. There is no moral basis for the state to force a business owner to serve another person. And all such laws that do so represent a form of theft.