Legal Commentary

I'm vacationing in British Columbia (beautiful!) and was, for much of the last week, camping and climbing on Mt. Rainier (I am disappointed to say that I failed to summit this year), so I've been for a while under the closest thing one can get these days to a news blackout.  I recently emerged, though, to learn that "[o]rganizations representing thousands of legal educators say they will boycott the Association of American Law Schools annual meeting in January if it is held at a San Diego hotel owned by a foe of same-sex marriage."  (Go here and here for some Mirror of Justice posts on the issue.) 

It appears that the concern animating the threatened boycott is not that the hotel discriminates against gays and lesbians; it is, instead, that the hotel's owner -- described by the National Law Journal as a "devout Catholic" -- donated money to support California's Proposition 8.  In the Journal story, Villanova's Louis Sirico, "chairman of the AALS Section on Legal Writing, Research and Reasoning, said that if the AALS does not move the meeting, his group will not attend events at the hotel.   'It's a matter of principle,' he said. 'We just don't believe in this kind of discrimination.'"

But again, it does not appear that the hotel -- or its owner, for that matter -- has actually engaged in any "kind of discrimination"; the owner, instead, has expressed (through financial contributions) support for a political measure, which Prof. Sirico and others believe to be discriminatory.  Should the distinction matter?  Perhaps not. 

What should we make of this particular threatened boycott?  If I had a relatively easy way of avoiding doing business with people I thought were nasty or malevolent, I suppose I would.  (Would I, if it were possible without too much inconvenience, avoid doing business with, say, large donors to NARAL Pro-Choice America, or some other group whose agenda I oppose?  Should I?  I'm not sure -- my efforts to not buy goods "made in China" have all been pathetic failures.)  And, I suppose that many people believe that the view the owner has expressed provides at least some evidence that he is someone with whom they ought not to do business.  Or, is something else going on?  That is, is it not so much that those threatening the boycott are seeking to avoid the taint that comes with associating themselves with the owner (and his views), but are instead seeking to express, through the boycott vehicle, as well as more conventional speech-vehicles, their own views, i.e., contrary views to the owner's?  Is it problematic, at all, that it is likely that at least some of the members of the various organizations discussed in the Journal story do not, in fact, object strongly to meeting at the hotel?