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The very tolerant townsfolk of Ypsilanti recently voted against repealing an anti-discrimination ordinance enacted by the city council last year.

The reaffirmed measure bars discrimination in 14 areas, including race, height, weight, religion, disability and — the instigating category — sexual orientation. Violation of the ordinance carries a possible $500 fine.

The issue arose when the owners of a local print shop turned down a job to print raffle tickets for a gay group, citing their fundamentalist Christian beliefs. This was regarded by the more enlightened Ypsilanti officialdom as insufficient justification for the shop owners to decline the business, so they adopted the ordinance to ensure tolerance for diversity in the future. Any regard for the property rights (not to mention the First Amendment “freedom of association” rights) of the shop owners never even merited so much as an honorable mention before the new law was passed unanimously. And, though legal protection against discrimination based on religion does fall within the purview of the ordinance, such concern apparently did not extend to the religious convictions of the shop owners.

This entire facet of anti-discrimination law — that is, that commercial establishments may be compelled to do business with whomever walks through the door, the owner’s wishes notwithstanding — goes back to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and a Supreme Court decision called Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States.

In that precedent-setting case a bigoted business owner had a policy against serving blacks, maintaining that it was his motel which he would, therefore, operate any way he pleased, and that those who didn’t like the policy were free to seek lodging elsewhere. The Justice Department disagreed with this line of reasoning and sued.

As with the failed attempt to secede from the union a century earlier, the Heart of Atlanta was broken again. The court ruled that the business was a “public accommodation” and thus in one breathtakingly sweeping act of obtuseness erased the distinction between public property (like, for instance, a state park) and private property open to the public (like, for instance, a motel.)

This ruling was so utterly muddle-headed that, as when the “separate but equal” doctrine enunciated in the nineteenth century Plessy v. Ferguson decision was finally and flatly repudiated in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, there will undoubtedly be no way around the chagrin of some future court having to simply admit that the learned Justices of the civil rights era were just plain wrong: there is a crucial difference between “public property” and “private property open to the public.”

Libertarians have long known that in rising to the defense of the rights of those with unpopular beliefs one is invariably accused of secretly harboring those self-same views. Members of the Illinois chapter of the ACLU discovered this unhappy consequence as well when they chose to defend the free speech and assembly rights of Nazis in the predominantly Jewish town of Skokie some years ago.

But in point of fact one need not be a bigot to defend the constitutional rights of bigots. Indeed, it is in precisely this arena that the battle to defend our American heritage of liberty must be fought. The First Amendment is, after all, not needed to protect popular speech. But the same can be said of all the rest of the protections guaranteed in the Constitution, as well.

The weekend after Ypsilanti voters endorsed the notion of using the coercive power of the almighty state to force private businesses to engage in commercial intercourse whether they like it or not, a group of several dozen Ku Klux Klansmen staged a rally in downtown Ann Arbor.

Considering the reaction to their demonstration I would be surprised if the Klan wouldn’t encounter some difficulties in getting their hate literature printed there. Given the liberal Ann Arbor ambit, some printers just might be offended and rather not do work for a group whose raison d’etre is to remove Jews, homosexuals and others they regard as undesirable from our midst.

Fortunately for the hate-mongers (and unfortunately for the rest of us), the KKK can now simply take their business to neighboring Ypsilanti. Under the new ordinance printers there can be required to serve them since they have from the beginning maintained that their message is all about God’s special affection and plan for the white race. And, as we have already seen, it is only the rights of customers and not those of store owners that are protected under law.

If a Christian-owned shop can be required to do printing for gays, a Jewish-owned shop can likewise be required to do printing for the Klan.

More on economic regulation:

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• Wholesale whining
• Michigan’s titanic business climate
• Downtown disaster areas
• Prescription for controlling drug costs
• Time to give workers the right