It is necessary to have regulations which impose certain restrictions on business. Obviously having too many regulations or regulations which are bad could have a negative impact on a business, but having no regulations at all would have a seriously detrimental impact on the general public. A balance needs to be struck. Men must be protected not only from their government, but from their fellow citizens as well.

"A better plan is to change the culture".

We used to have a one-word term for this, and it was abhorred by freedom-loving types, like Objectivists pretend to be..."brainwashing".

The best and most benign example from the past century (translation: the one example I can use that won't get me inundated with indignant, hateful replies) is the war on tobacco.

See, I don't really care what people believe... so long as they come to their beliefs on their own, without having beliefs imposed on them by media, government, and others who lust for power over the human mind.

EDIT:
oops... there's another example I can use, mostly because the campaign has been far less successful... "Climate Change" / Environmentalism.

I didn't know Bill Cosby was a sports figure.

Well, I guess he did play a tennis pro in "I Spy".

Of course, Levar Burton was probably some kind of sports figure, before making "Roots" and "Star Drek: the Next Germination"

That's "Hedley".
Madame Curie wasn't an engineer, was she?

>> Today, women discriminate against other women in physical science.

Maybe they know something you don't, specifically that women are generally inferior to men in physics (and engineering generally, for that matter). But in specific regard to physics, I would refer you to the desperate attempts by the CEEB to gender norm the Physics Level II Achievement test. After much effort and considerable angst, they concluded they could gender norm the test or test knowledge of physics - but not both. In point of fact, they determined that the women did slightly better than men when the problems were "cookbook" requiring simple computation. But for more advanced problems in physics requiring more original thinking (the part that made the test "Level II") the women failed miserably.

Bear in mind that this is the major testing organization for most college admissions, and that they were greatly concerned that their tests might be "prejudicial" on a gender basis, and that they were willing to reformulate the entire test to get a gender-normed result with the single caveat that the test had to test advanced knowledge of physics.

It couldn't be done.

Now, for a real-world look at women in physics/engineering, go to any university and check the student population. Majority women? Mostly. Except maybe at the academies and at engineering schools. Go to the college of engineering. Majority women? Hell no. Not even close. Is it because engineering doesn't pay well? Because it's a career with no future? Is it because a woman will make more money with a degree in English Literature? Is it because women are being discriminated against in engineering? (If so, how… exactly how?) Or is it more likely that women's brains just don't work that way?

I'm not saying that there's no such thing as a good female engineer (though I've yet to meet one). But if you had to bet on credentials, i'd go with the male engineer. For one thing, I know his grades haven't been inflated by a "politically correct" instructor.

Totally disagree. She makes several baseless assumptions and makes many false claims that demonstrate she has no clue how discrimination actually works.

Racist/Prejudiced businesses would go bankrupt.
** There is no evidence to support this theory. It is pure, baseless speculation. The claim that the entire populace would be so outraged that they would refuse to buy anything from the business is a theory with no factual evidence behind it. A certain percentage of the population would be enraged enough to boycott the business, sure, but the masses would probably largely be indifferent, and the bottom line of the business would not be negatively impacted. In some cases, being racist or prejudiced could actually make a business MORE profitable, if the general population is racist as well. A restaurant in Orange County, California that didn't serve black people would find no shortage of customers.

Speaking of the baseless assumption that discrimination automatically leads to bankruptcy, a few months ago I saw a story about a lesbian couple that was turned away when they tried to buy a wedding cake at a particular bakery (exact same situation as was being discussed in the previous topic, but a different bakery and a different couple). When word got out that the bakery had discriminated against the couple, the bakery's customer base increased by quite a bit. There were so many bigoted, homophobic people in that area that the bakery's discrimination was seen as a positive by the general population, and helped to increase the owner's revenues. The lesson? The free market does NOT, in fact, eliminate discrimination automatically.

Law doesn't change culture.
** This is totally untrue. Law has a tremendous impact on culture. Anything which is illegal is stigmatized as evil. Most people make no distinction between legality and morality, and they base their views of the second on the status of the first. A big reason racism was so bad before before the Civil Rights Movement was because it was legally required and enforced by law. If you give something a legal sanction, you give it a moral sanction, and thereby allow it to flourish. Legality and morality cannot be separated in the eye of the public.

No body should be forced to provide a service for another person.
** Actually, if they're a business owner and they're providing service to the general public, yes they should. A business owner can control almost every aspect of his business, but he cannot choose his customers. As for the hypothetical example she uses at the end where members of the Westboro Baptist Church come into a business owned by a gay person and the gay business owner has to provide them service, I suppose yeah, he would. Religion is, after all, a legally protected status under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But if that's the price for equality, then so be it.

Now keep in mind that although the gay business owner could not kick them out simply because they're members of the Westboro Baptist Church, he COULD kick them out if they started shouting, causing a ruckus, and/or harassing other customers. There is no legal protection for disruptive behavior.

She says that a better plan is to change the culture and make it more accepting of diverse people, but what she fails to realize is that the fact that bigoted business owners have to keep the their bigotry a secret is proof that such change has already occurred. It shows that such views are not accepted.

Ultimately, eliminating bigotry is not possible, so instead we have to settle for creating a society in which it is stigmatized and punished. That's the only way to keep it under control.

Can she be a vixen, being a lesbian?

You hear the one about the lesbian Polack...?

Her purpose is to "out" people she disagrees with for purposes of their persecution. Suits me.

The United States should be an exception. Hence "American exceptionalism".

As every government in the history of mankind does this, I'm sure you'll have no problem finding a totalitarian state that suits you, no need to make one here.