[hackerspaces] Your mission statement vs the law, re bigotry and "terrorism".

[Jurgen Gaeremyn]

Just a stupid question: do you put ethnicity and religion as
questionnaire fields in your registration form?

If you don't ask, you don't know. And if you have no indication to
suspect "such dangerous behaviour as being muslim" (sic) ... there's no
indication to ban them from whatever course. It has never been your job
to do an identity check, and even the act of asking... I don't think you
even have the right to investigate their answers.

Obviously, you could put a waiver in your registration form that members
are not allowed to apply their skills developed in this hackerspace to
engage in terrorist or other forms of illegal activity. You could even
have fun in writing it in such a broad or silly way that lawyers would
have a hell of a time applying it in court...

If anyone ever comments on the validity of this, just ask the question
how you should validate if one is muslim? (just as a pun: according to
those muslims that engage in terrorist activity, all other muslims are
not true muslims, and it is allowed to lie against "kufar" - so the
muslim not respecting you will deny being a muslim and you will
stigmatize the honest ones with no malintentions)

Just my thaught
Jurgen

On 22-07-16 23:05, Sparr wrote:
> I've been on the losing side of lighter versions of this argument a
> few times over the past ten years, at various hackerspaces. A lot of
> people claim that they think that the law trumps a space's charter or
> mission statement.
>
> Here in the USA, we're looking at a future where it is scarily
> plausible that some segment of the population will be banned from a
> lot of activities, which might include things such as "taking machine
> shop classes" or "working with explosive gases".
>
> When your state or federal legislature passes a law, or your president
> issues an executive order, that says Muslims (or some ethnic minority)
> can't do those things, where will you stand on whether your space
> follows that law or not?
>
>
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