Private association is a freedom, and a freedom exercised only in approved ways is not one

The argument

Proponents of this position begin from freedom of association. A private club is a group of people who have decided to spend their own time and money in one another's company, on premises they pay for, under rules they set between themselves. Nobody is compelled to join, nobody is denied a public service by being outside it, and no office or qualification depends on membership. On that description, proponents argue, how the members choose each other is their own business in the same way that a household's guest list is. They then press the general principle. Societies accept without much difficulty that women form women-only groups, that religious bodies admit co-religionists, that a choir may require singers and a book club may decline someone who has not read the book. Freedom of association includes the freedom to decline, because a group that may not decline anyone is not an association at all but a public facility. A freedom that may be exercised only in the directions other people approve of, proponents argue, is not a freedom but a permission. The argument is careful about its limits. Where a body holds a public function, awards a professional qualification, or operates as the effective gateway to an occupation, proponents generally accept that it may not exclude. What they deny is that the ordinary dining and drinking club falls into that class merely because some of its members are well placed. Where a club is genuinely private, the objection reduces to disapproval of the members' preferences, and disapproval, on this view, is not a ground for prohibition in a society that lets people choose their own company.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Opponents reply that the word private does the argument's work while concealing what these clubs are. Where the membership is drawn from those who run business and public life, the dining room is where decisions are previewed and introductions made, so being shut out of it means being shut out of opportunity rather than of company. They add that the comparison with women-only groups misses their purpose, which is to provide a space for a group historically shut out, whereas a men-only club preserves the arrangement that shut them out.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Conferring no office or qualification is precisely what is contested. Where membership overlaps with those who make appointments and award contracts, a club confers access to both without needing to confer either formally. [Rejecting P2] Associations decline members on grounds connected to their purpose, which nobody disputes. The freedom claimed here is to decline on a ground unconnected to anything the club does, which is a different claim needing its own defence. [Rejecting P3] The comparison treats all single-sex association as one kind. A group formed by those shut out of general social life and a group maintaining that exclusion stand differently, whatever they share in form. [Rejecting C] Permitted to exist and worth defending are run together here. Few opponents propose prohibition; the question is whether the arrangement should continue to be honoured, and this argument does not reach it.