Preferences vs discrimination

"One thing I have never had adequately explained to me by devotees of the anti-discrimination cult is whether paying customers should also be prevented from discriminating in their consumption preferences. Given that the relationship between an employer and an employee is simply a form of trade in services in return for money, it strikes me as rather peculiar that ALL forms of discrimination in trade are not outlawed consistently. For example, if I decline to purchase the services of a tradesman to fix my house (the exact same nature of transaction as if I were an "employer") because he happens to be Uzbek, should he have the right to legal redress against me as a "discriminating" customer?

Moreover, we also seem to be "discriminating" in the application of "anti-discrimination laws" in the workplace - employees are also parties to an agreement to trade services for money, so how come they are accorded no official opprobrium if they decline to sign a contract with, say, a Muslim employer? In short, anti-discrimination laws are an attempt to outlaw the motives of the purchasing party to an agreed trade, but only if they happen to own a shop!

The real principle that is being attacked here is "freedom of association" and private conscience. Consistently applied (i.e. in a non-discriminatory fashion), anti-discrimination laws have the effect of criminalising voluntary trade between consenting parties, while obliging them to trade with others on some arbitrary criteria, and even criminalising consumer preferences themselves. Forcing somebody to trade with someone else against their will is ethically indistinguishable from holding a knife to a tourist's throat in a crowded market and demanding they "pay" for your worthless merchandise (as is known to happen in some parts of SE Asia) - and it is long past due that the ideological hogwash known as "anti-discrimination" is struck from the statute books permanently.

So to conclude this short post, I most certainly do discriminate in my economic and social preferences, on all kinds of verboten grounds (including race, religion and sex), and there isn't a damn thing that any sanctimonious blowhard can do about it."

Mais aqui.