except you keep insisting religion is the only institution allowed to define what marriage is, when marriage did not even start with religion to begin with. the claim that organized religions should be the only ones to define what marriage is is ludicrous.

do you...do you not know basic history? like, how businesses in the South used to deny service to blacks based on "personal beliefs"? or how public facilities used to have segregated buildings, where the sides meant for black persons almost always ended up being inferior or dangerous? are you posting from the U.S.? am i making a huge assumption that people still receive basic education in history?

i'm sorry, but the only one showing a dangerous lack of basic knowledge here is you.

your response is "the free market provides"? really?

sorry, but the U.S. has pretty strong evidence already that this won't work. as in, the entire period of segregation and Jim Crow discrimination in the South. try again.

as an individual, yes, you can associate with whomever you want or don't want, and you can hold racist or sexist or whatever beliefs until you're the head of the Duck Dynasty or the KKK.

that question is ENTIRELY DIFFERENT from that of public-facing businesses and organizations. if you permit such organizations to deny service to people based on who those persons fundamentally are (ex: race, sex, gender, etc.), you no longer have a free society. you have segregation and the Jim Crow south. you have modern-day Russia where gay persons are persecuted on a daily basis.

when you speak of "freedom" and "liberty", do you really mean that all people should have access to freedom and liberty? because permitting businesses to deny services to some simply results in "freedom" and "liberty" for a select few, which is in reality not liberty or freedom at all.

and yet you don't even grasp that businesses having the ability to deny service to a particular group of people because the business owner does not like that person's sex or race or other fundamental part of their being is precisely denying those people their right in choosing what they want to do?

be self aware for at least ONE SECOND in your life. liberty is a TWO WAY STREET.

it really ticks me off how the right has characterized the ability to be openly racist, sexist, misogynist, transphobic, and homophobic as "freedom and liberty. absolutely disgusting.

society cannot and will not have actual liberty when businesses and public-facing organizations are permitted to discriminate against people for who they are under the guise of "religious freedom" or "liberty." the very notion is abhorrent to an open democracy, and it amazes how the right uses mental gymnastics to reach the conclusions they have.

*looks at Iraq*

*laughs until the point of crying.*

not that i am disagreeing with the skepticism here, but do you have hard data establishing this to not be true? because all the griping here about the number not being realistic means bupkus without actual, hard data.

you're not a scientist, or even science-adjacent, are you. research institutions, both public and private, review incredible amounts of scientific literature, research results, and related items on a daily basis. that's part of science.

what's not common sense is the belief that the EPA, or any other private or public agency doing science review and research, should stop reviewing data at an arbitrary limit of studies. that's not only the exact antithesis of good science, it's also an asinine claim.

the devil is in the details:

The secret science bill, for example, would apparently bar EPA from using public health studies based on confidential patient information, wrote the American Statistical Association’s president, David Morganstein, in a 25 February letter to lawmakers. That would force the agency into “a choice between maintaining data confidentiality and issuing needed regulations,” he wrote. Also, efforts to deidentify sensitive data before release—by stripping names and other information—aren’t fail-safe, Morganstein wrote.

Democrats are further concerned about another provision, not included in earlier versions, that would give EPA only $1 million per year to implement the bill, which would entail, among other things, obtaining raw data from study authors. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office calculated that the bill would cost $250 million annually to implement early on, and that’s only if EPA were to halve the number of studies it used to 25,000 annually, said Representative Donna Edwards (D–MD)

this bill is not even remotely about "transparency." it's about hamstringing the EPA.

except you're adding unnecessarily to the hypothetical

"FedEx refuses to ship flowers." is DRASTICALLY different than "FedEx refuses to ship flowers to Alpha because of who Alpha is."

FedEx is refusing to ship a specific product, not refusing to deliver products to people because of their identity. The situations are entirely different.