River Dog wrote:Sure, the seat isn't your private property, but the right to use it at a certain date and time is. So long as you're not doing anything illegal with it, what business is it of the owners to dictate what you do with that right?
Their rights are laid out in the terms and conditions and the law gives business owners a ton of rights to regulate the behavior of patrons on their property. If I start acting weird and yelling in a restaurant, they can kick me out, even if I'm not breaking a law. If I buy a ticket to a play and record the performance, breaking the terms and conditions of the ticket, they can kick me out and decide not to sell me another ticket. I can be kicked out of a gas station for not wearing a shirt. Etc.
I see your argument for what you think you
ought to be able to do, and there is a legitimate argument to be had there. And to be clear I'm not saying it's legal to confiscate tickets if a person resells them, although it wouldn't shock me if they could put that in the terms and conditions, too. I'm just saying that businesses have a ton of legal leeway to decide the person with whom they want to do business, and what the Hawks are doing seems well within the laws.
River Dog wrote:So, if you buy a box of apples from me, do I have the right to tell you that you can't take it to a farmer's market and re-sell them at a 50% profit or else I won't sell you anymore apples? Even though you're not discriminating on the basis of a protected status, you still have to give a rational explanation for your action, and not wanting to sell a ticket to someone rooting for the visiting team doesn't seem like an appropriate reason to discriminate.
Honestly, I'm nearly positive the apple seller's action is legal in most states. At the federal level, the shopkeeper just needs to comply with the Civil Rights Act, but some states have expanded the list of protected classes. A shopowner can deny service for lots of reasons; they don't have to sell to the first person to show up with legal tender.
I think the better analogy here is with nightclubs that have doormen who choose who can go in. They are within their legal rights to deny entry to a person who is ugly or not wearing the right clothes because that person doesn't fit the aesthetic of the club or the doorman thinks they don't have the right energy. That's pretty much exactly what the Hawks are looking to do.
The one complicating factor is that Lumen is partly publicly owned, but I'm sure that original agreement spells out what that means for public access and the Hawks' ability to control the gates.
River Dog wrote:Imagine being a bartender and refusing to serve someone who has an accent under the guise that it's not on the basis of sex, race, nationality, ie protected status. You can't just say "I have the right to refuse service to anyone." You still have to give some sort of reasonable explanation for refusing service.
That one might be contested because nationality is a protected class, and therefore an explanation for why service was refused would probably be needed. But the basic answer is the same as above. The explanation doesn't have to be related to abiding by the law. In other words, the burden of proof isn't on a business to demonstrate their right to deny service. Legally, the burden of proof would be on the plantiff to show that the reason they were kicked out was illegally based on a protected class characteristic (with the public vs. private caveat, of course, and I definitely don't understand that and I doubt many other than the lawyers involved really understand it).
I know that, not long ago, a federal judge said that a bar legally denied service to a guy in a MAGA hat because
political ideology isn't a protected class.
River Dog wrote:How is the lack of enthusiasm bad for business? Do they buy fewer concessions? Buy less from the team store? Will it allow the Seahawks to sell their tickets for a higher price? So long as the stadium is full, it shouldn't make any difference how enthusiastic the fans are, they're going to sell the same amount of stuff and make the same amount of money regardless of what jersey they happen to be wearing.
I want to see the stadium fill up with screaming Hawk fans and turn our house into that intimidating venue it and its predecessor the Kingdome was for all those years just as badly if not more than anyone else. But this rule seems a little odd to say the least.
If the stadium is full, you're mostly right (I might quibble with revenue from the team shop, but that's not making a big impact on the game day revenue and not really what we're talking about). But: (1) I could see that they might start worrying that a watered down atmosphere could start leading to attendance declines; (2) teams definitely consider how to keep the vibes good in a city and they could worry that a less frenzied crowd and home field advantage could be the canary in the coal mine of problems ahead; and (3) a raucous crowd probably helps TV viewership (especially as that was the calling card of the 12s for so long), and the Hawks are definitely declining in viewership. I'm not a businessman and I don't know if any of these ideas are good; I'm just saying that I can easily see a world in which the business side of the organization would be worried about a decline in the game day experience.
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Although I said above it doesn't trouble me, I want to reiterate that I know it doesn't affect me much and it's not a hill I'll die on. I'm really just talking about the legality. I actually don't like the bedrock laws I think these statues are related to; I think they're connected with corporate personhood laws, and I think those laws are a net negative for society. But as long as we grant business things like free speech, we grant them many of the protections that individuals/homeowners have to regulate the behavior of people on our property. I think it's easy to forget that as much as we want individual freedom and liberty to act as we want with our property and have rights when we're in public, those businesses' rights are based in the same laws as our own.
Posted: Sun May 11, 2025 6:17 am