The North Carolina bill that would exclude members of the LGBT community from antidiscrimination policies has created an uproar all over the country. Musicians, including Bruce Springsteen, have decided to cancel concerts in the state, and PayPal has scrapped their plans to expand operations into Charlotte, North Carolina, putting 400 people out of a job. The most controversial portion of the bill concerns transgendered people using the restrooms assigned to the genders they identify as. Proponents claim they are protecting women and young girls from sexual assault and allowing them the privacy they are entitled to, but aren't the transgendered also entitled to privacy? I'll leave that to you to ponder, but in the meantime, let's get back to the economic backlash.

The North Carolina legislature in session.

I think the PayPal decision may have been more than a little heavy-handed, but it goes to show how exercising the right to refuse service to anyone can backfire on a business, or in this case an entire state. Business owners with such a policy have been responsible for a lot of discrimination in our history, refusing to hire or do business with Irish and Italian immigrants, blacks, Latinos or really anyone who doesn't fit the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) mold. They always claim moral indignation over this or that minority group's lifestyle or "agenda," but I just don't see how a person's private life is anyone else's business. The business of business is to provide goods or services and, if all goes well, turn a profit, not to police customers' values. Turning someone away because of their race, religion, sexual orientation or gender dysphoria just decreases your profit potential in the long run. A business owner does have the right to call the police on a shoplifter or someone threatening customers with a weapon, but not on someone who is shopping while different.

PayPal exercised this right against North Carolina.

I've been to numerous businesses in my lifetime, and I can tell you that most of them don't look like churches, not that they should discriminate for the things people can't control either. I don't see anyone receiving communion at checkout or hear anyone singing hymns, no baptisms, absolutely nothing that resembles the religious institutions I recognize. In fact, considering Jesus' outrage towards the money changers in the Temple, I believe business and religion should stay separate. Commerce pays the bills and makes living in the world possible, but religion is supposed to be about the ideal of transcending the material world. That said, business should be conducted ethically, and nondiscrimination seems entirely ethical to me, but then again, I'm a lit major, not an economist.

Does this look like a church to you?