All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 18, 2021 - Jim Fetzer
18:39
Tennessee Files the Medical Non-Discrimination Business and Consumer Act
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi, I'm Gary Humble with Tennessee Stands and I wanted to take a moment and talk about a bill that is here in Tennessee that we strongly support and that we helped lobby in our legislature.
It's SB 320.
HB 794.
This is the Medical Nondiscrimination Business and Consumer Act.
And we want to thank conservative media, folks like Daniel Horowitz with Blaze TV, who have written about this bill and supported it and really got it out there.
Now, as of today, I'm getting calls from Kentucky, from Ohio, from North Carolina, from other states around the country Um, looking at similar legislation, wanting to know how they can do this in their state.
And I will say this is a great conversation to have.
It's stirring quite a bit of debate, even amongst conservatives.
So I wanted to address, um, two primary issues.
That come up with the bill in terms of conservative values and, and just sort of frame the conversation to make sure we're thinking about this the right way.
But, but before I even address those two things, I just want to say this, look, can we, can we all acknowledge if we can just step outside of our COVID brain for just a minute and acknowledge that a year ago, or a little bit more than a year ago now, prior to COVID, We would have never imagined in the United States of America that a business could force someone to wear a mask, or to take a vaccine potentially, or to potentially take a COVID test in order to receive or purchase goods and services.
A year ago, no way would we have been able to have this conversation.
But now, a year later, In our post-COVID, post-apocalyptic brain, somehow we're being led to believe that, oh, no, it's private property rights.
It's private property rights.
Yeah, businesses can do whatever they want.
That's the conversation now.
As if businesses in the United States face no regulation, right?
Business owners, you guys know this, right?
You face no regulation whatsoever.
We've always had liberty and property rights as business owners to do whatever we wanted to do.
That's the bill we're being sold right now, and I'm telling you, it's a lie, and it's not necessarily a constitutional idea.
Before I get to the private property issue, And the public accommodation issue, which I want to address.
I want you to take a look at these news clips.
This is May, June, and July of last year in 2020.
And I want to make sure you're clear on what happened and how our brains have been retrained by government.
All right, here we go.
Clip one.
The masks work.
They work.
Uh, and we have to culturalize the masks.
We have to customize the masks.
Uh, break.
We, we have to culturalize the mask.
All right, let's get back to it.
For New York to get New Yorkers to wear them.
We're bringing 1 million additional masks today.
And today I'm signing an executive order that authorizes private businesses To deny entrance to people who do not wear a mask or a face covering.
I have been working to communicate this message about masks and how effective they are.
They are deceptively effective.
All right, so here's what I want to pay attention to from this clip.
Governor Cuomo in the state of New York signed, and it's not really about New York and Cuomo, it's about public perception.
So clearly, the people at the time, this is May 2020, the people of New York, the general thought was, well, businesses can't deny service to people because they don't wear a mask.
See, this is how we used to think.
So government had to step in and make a change.
So what did Governor Cuomo do in May of 2020?
He signed an executive order giving businesses the right, giving them the right, why?
Because I guess they didn't have it before, to deny entry to customers on their property who were not wearing masks.
So I want you to understand that.
That this wasn't a generally accepted idea that a business could even do this.
So the government of New York had to sign an executive order.
Let's take a look at clip two.
This is now June 2020.
Dallas County Friday becoming the fourth large county in the state requiring businesses to come up with a health and safety policy requiring customers wear masks where six feet of social distancing isn't possible.
The move comes after rising daily cases and hospitalizations for COVID-19 and after Governor Abbott said it was okay to put requirements on businesses but not individuals.
All right, so this is step two.
This is the next phase.
So what New York did in May was give businesses the right to refuse service for not wearing a mask.
Now in June, this is in Texas, in Dallas County, and what they're doing, they're taking it one more step.
I'm not sure that's working so well.
So the county is now mandating that businesses And now let's talk about private property for a minute, because we're all about private property rights, right?
So private property rights, apparently, so we're told, Give businesses the right to do whatever they want to do.
To make people wear masks, to make them take a vaccine, or whatever it is they want them to do.
But those same property rights do not protect the business from government being mandated to mandate the masks.
Do you see the disparity?
In one case, all private property rights.
Businesses have private property rights, constitutionally.
They can make consumers do whatever they want.
But when it's government making businesses do something they don't necessarily want to do, well, businesses don't have private property rights anymore.
Where's the business's constitutional property rights when the government steps in and says, well, you have to make a mandate.
Do you see where this is starting to get really screwy?
Let's take a look at clip three.
Governor Whitmer's new executive order requiring masks puts the onus on businesses to identify and also confront people who aren't wearing face coverings.
It's no surprise then that some business owners feel they and their employees are caught in the middle of this as some customers simply refuse to protect themselves and others by wearing a mask.
The governor's new executive order on mask wearing came down as the defenders were speaking with Tom Brady who runs Jim Brady.
He says the order confirms what they already knew.
That they are the ones that have to enforce it.
And now businesses can lose its license if they don't.
And some customers are taking their frustrations out on them.
So now you have July 2020.
You have a report coming out of Michigan.
Governor Whitmer is now taking Yet, the next step and requiring not only that the business require masks of their consumers, but that the business now enforce the mask policy.
And we have seen this all over Tennessee.
Shelby County Health Directive, by the way, has that same type of directive to the business owner where it's on the business owners.
It's their responsibility to enforce the policy.
And if a customer is not wearing a mask, to ask them to wear a mask or to try to coerce them to leave the store.
And if they don't, the business gets fined.
So we've gone from a business having a right to refuse service to the government mandating that the business make a mandate.
And now the government is requiring of the business owner To be law enforcement.
To literally be a law enforcement agent on their fellow citizens.
And now enter what's going on in Austria.
Did you see the tongs?
Did you see the awesome photo op with the plastic gloves and the tongs issuing the masks?
I mean, my god, this It's so crazy where we are right now and the way we've lost our minds, quite frankly, all around the world.
Here's what this bill does.
Let's take a look at the private property issue for a moment.
Because what I'm trying to show you is the way we used to think and the way we're thinking now.
How those two things don't line up.
Let's address the private property rights issue.
I'm gonna pick on Kroger for a minute.
Not because Kroger's done anything egregious or anything worse than anybody else.
I'm just using an example, okay?
So I've got a Kroger grocery store down the street.
Here's the thing about Kroger.
When you think about private property, they're owned by, I don't know who knows how many shareholders, but I would imagine thousands upon thousands of shareholders.
Kroger is a publicly traded company.
So you've got thousands of shareholders of individuals who collectively own these properties, right?
That's number one.
Number two, most of these shareholders don't even live In my city, much less my state of Tennessee, I would imagine that a lot of them don't even live in the United States.
Okay?
So you have a collectively owned piece of property by thousands of individuals who don't even live here, who perhaps aren't even United States citizens.
Okay?
Next, you have the issue of state tax incentives.
That Kroger down the street is not there just by the free market and because of my shopping habits.
They're there because of state-induced tax incentives.
By the way, on the backs of my tax money and your tax money.
So let's get this straight in terms of private property.
You have a private property owned by several thousand shareholders, some of whom potentially are not even United States citizens.
They certainly don't live in the state of Tennessee.
And lastly, have said property because of the benefits they've received off of my tax dollars.
All right.
A state tax benefit.
Right.
And All of those things are now supposed to give them some sort of private property construed liberty right to require me to wear a mask or possibly have a vaccine in the future or have some sort of test possibly, some sort of medical intervention, the wearing of some sort of medical device, which is what a mask is.
It's not a shirt.
Shirts aren't meant to prevent or treat diseases.
Masks are.
If something is meant with the intention of preventing a disease, guess what it is?
It's a medical device.
So this private property now gives these collective shareholders, through their board and through their CEO, the right to promulgate a rule which forces me to wear a mask to go in to buy a loaf of bread.
Are we really thinking clearly about this?
Is that really what our founders meant by private property rights?
I don't think so.
I don't think those two things are completely equal.
And Houston, we have a problem.
And we need to rethink.
Again, a year ago, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.
This would be such an asinine, crazy conversation to be having right now.
But here we are, you know, a year into COVID.
And we're having it.
I'd like to take a moment and read something to you from our general counsel here at Tennessee Stands.
His name is Larry Crane, a great constitutional law attorney here in the state of Tennessee.
And we had him draft an opinion on this bill, on SB 320.
And he had something to say about property rights.
I want to read this to you.
It's really important.
He says this.
Some have argued that the proposed bill will undercut private property rights of business owners.
This argument is flawed for several reasons.
First, there is no constitutional right as a business owner to arbitrarily deny one class of individuals access based on their medical status or their willingness to produce medical documentation or submit to an interrogation regarding their exemption from wearing a medical device.
Secondly, the personal liberty interests of individuals to be free from unwarranted intrusion into their private medical status outweigh the corporate interests of commercial entities which must take into account the discriminatory nature of their practices.
Finally, the ownership of commercial private property doesn't confer the right to coerce, intimidate, threaten, or interfere with a person on the basis of their medical status or condition.
These are critical aspects of these bills and providing for what we've always thought to be the right to privacy for individual for a medical condition.
Businesses do not have the right or the competency to judge someone's medical condition, to require medical treatment, or to require the use of a medical device to receive goods and services.
It's never been part of what we've believed here in America.
So, outside of private property rights, I want to touch on one thing.
Places of public accommodation.
I want to make sure that it's clear to everyone that this law, the Medical Non-Discrimination Business and Consumer Act, does not affect all private property.
It doesn't affect your home.
In fact, it doesn't even affect every business.
It affects places of public accommodation.
All right.
And these are places of public accommodation, by the way, is clearly defined in our American Disabilities Act, United States Code, in Title III of the ADA.
And these are, for example, restaurants, grocery stores, movie theaters, coffee shops, gyms, amusement parks.
These are all places of public accommodation where someone opens their doors and says, anyone and everyone come on in and receive these goods and services.
For a long time, our laws now for decades have recognized the distinction of places of public accommodation.
And those businesses have always been regulated regarding discrimination policy.
This is nothing new in the state of Tennessee, much less the United States.
And that's not unconstitutional.
A private property owner at some point in time decided that they were going to start a business earning them the designation of a place of public accommodation.
And that business owner willingly Subjected themselves to a greater deal of legal scrutiny under places of public accommodation.
That was not coerced upon the property owner by the government.
The government, the individual, the business owner chose to operate a business that placed their business under a greater deal of legal scrutiny, discrimination laws, and having to abide by the American Disabilities Act.
This is nothing new.
So I'm simply saying where we used to believe that businesses could not discriminate against you based on medical reasons, based on your private medical information, based on whether or not those individuals perceived that you may or may not be sick, which is something that should solely be between you and your physician.
That used to be just accepted common sense.
That businesses did not have have the right to regulate the health care of their consumers.
But post COVID, I don't know if it's PTSD or what you want to call it.
All of a sudden, businesses have private property rights now to make you as a consumer Do anything they want you to do.
We don't have regulations in the United States anymore.
Guys, this is a big deal.
Passing this law...
is a big deal because we have pretended to, we've abandoned laws that have been on the books for decades.
We're pretending that the ADA and that HIPAA laws just don't exist anymore.
They've just dissipated into thin air with action from no one.
So, I'm asking our General Assembly.
Look, please.
We need you.
We need our legislators here in Tennessee, the volunteer state.
Guys, we need to step up.
And we're asking you, as citizens of this state, to lead.
And other states are watching.
Conservatives in other states who are begging for this type of legislation are watching what we're going to do here in the state of Tennessee.
We're asking you to lead.
Pass SB 320.
Let's protect both businesses and the liberties and privacy rights of consumers.
▲
Export Selection