I happened to be reading this article when my oldest son looked over my shoulder and started reading along with me. This lead to a conversation of sorts with him, which I rather enjoyed.
At first my son was actively against the shop owners. He said he would have sued the owners, too. Not because of any particular leaning so much as he views all discrimination as wrong. I explored his thinking on that for a bit and I was satisfied with where he was coming from, but then I told him how things might have been different in Montana. I shared with him how, in lot of states, the right to refuse service to anyone is available to business owners. I also shared with him how customers have the same right not to go to a particular business. They can complain to others about it, too, which usually works out better that just suing somebody. It was fun to discuss the various alternatives.
We spoke on a lot of different topics related to the situation and the fun thing for me was watching him consider other viewpoints than his own. He didn’t dismiss things out of hand, he spent time thinking about where the shop owners were coming from and why. He considered other ways to handle the conflict and what some of the results were. At the end of the day he held to his own opinion, for his own reasons, but he thought about things! It was a great father/son moment, but it also made me laugh and think about how often I can’t have that kind of conversation with an adult…
