It is the baker's right to bake a cake for who ever they feel like baking a cake for. You can't force someone to do something.
https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/the-right-to-refuse-servi...
If we think this law is outdated and need to be expanded, there are due process to change the law. We don't extend law just because we feel right.
I agree we should change the law for the sake of clarity, but laws change how they work in practice due to legal decisions all the time.
The OP's point should be revised: It's the bakers right to bake cakes however they want. And that's mostly true. If a KKK member came in and asked for a cake with lynching imagery on it, its their right to refuse service. Everything more morally noble than that is just shades of gray, and you do not want the courts and law getting involved in that kind of shades of gray. Leave it to the markets.
I'm increasingly convinced that the left is moving us toward a 1984-era world of pushing every little offense into the courts and law. They don't understand how important these fundamental liberties are, which doesn't mean they can't be tempered with things like the Civil Rights Act, but the spirit is still important. When the 2A goes, that's when its all over.
The Civil Rights Act seems to have worked out fine. The legal ability to refuse to sell houses to KKK members, but not to black people, seems to have not caused serious problems in society, a lack of fundamental liberties, whatever. Are there serious problems that I'm not noticing?
However, your point about the left moving us towards orwellianism due to over litigating seems like B.S. to me. The second amendment isn’t a freedom canary (see australia). The Right just used the courts to redefine money as speech.
I don’t see how free speech is destoryed if sexual orientation or gender expression become protected classes like race, or country of origin.
Imagine you’re a Jewish artist and sell your premade work in a gallery to the public, and also offer custom portrait commissions. An avowed Nazi can come and purchase your paintings, but you should never be forced to paint their portrait. You can imagine this scenario any number of ways, gay artist and fundamentalist anti-gay preacher for instance.
It’s not so much a slippery slope as a bright line, once you give the majority that power it will be abused.
No. They had not discussed the content of the cake when they were refused service.
>I'm increasingly convinced that the left is moving us toward a 1984-era world...
Of course you are, because that narrative creates fear and fear sells.
Considering you’re not aware of the basic facts of this case, if your perception of such cases informs your paranoid worldview then perhaps it’s time to reassess it.
Everything you just described as criteria for refusal was by personal choice.
I think this discussion is likely to be more productive if folks who hold the belief you're holding also state what their agreement is with existing laws restricting how people can participate in the market: if you also disagree with housing anti-discrimination laws, that's fine, but it'll be easier to understand your position if you say you're advocating for those being unjust too. If you don't, I'm curious where you draw the distinction.
(Disclosure, I'm Christian, but also I'm a non-white member of the whitest mainline Protestant denomination in the US....)
However, I suggest reading the Court's opinions to see what reasons they actually used in their ruling.[1]
Their ruling focused largely on how they felt that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission (CCRC) didn't properly respect the baker's religious beliefs, and that the CCRC has demonstrated inconsistencies with their rulings on other similar cases.
[1]https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-111_j4el.pdf
As of now, does not include sexual orientation (as far as I can tell), although other bodies have interpreted sexual orientation to be protected (Equal Opportunity Employment)
From a legal perspective you absolutely can. That is the purpose of having a legal system after all. If someone behaves otherwise then that's where the justice system comes in.
This overstates it some. The baker is not forced to run a business that sells cakes to the public.
> The principle you use to compel that speech would have broad implications for artists, writers, and all other creators.
Not clear what the implications would be. I am not coming with broad results or impacts in a few minutes of thought. I get examples like:
* An artists that sells couple portraits to couples can not refuse a gay couple.
* A writer who sells obituaries to the public can not refuse to write one about a gay person.
* A baker who sells cakes to the public can not refuse to bake a cake for a gay couple.
Capitalism actially straight up sometimes requires regulation. Sorry.
Money is power, and nothing concentrates wealth like capitalism.
The market would have eventually driven these discriminatory businesses to bankruptcy. Majority public opinion had changed. That's why we were able to pass the laws. Would there be some holdouts? Maybe, but they probably wouldn't have lasted in the face of protests and pickets and lack of customers. Those that did would not be numerous enough to matter.
The landscape may have evolved since, especially with large companies, but if you don’t believe there are still scores of small businesses in small towns who get away with discrimination on a frequent basis, you should get out some more.
In the south many restaurants did not sell to African-Americans. Those restaurants did very well in the free market compared to restaurants that sold to African-Americans.
They are a public accommodation and laws apply to them. He isn't compelled to bake them a cake, but only in the sense that he isn't compelled to operate a company that sells cakes to the public.
If a gay person walked in, picked a cake off the shelf and said "I'd like to buy this cake" and was refused for being gay, that's a different story. As in that would literally be a completely different story than what happened.
The question in this case was not whether the baker would sell a cake to a gay person (he was willing to do so), it was whether the baker had to make a cake with a particular message that he felt violated his personal and deeply held beliefs.
>The Colorado Court of Appeals ruled that Mr. Phillips’s free speech rights had not been violated, noting that the couple had not discussed the cake’s design before Mr. Phillips turned them down.
"We don't serve women here"
"We don't serve Chinese here"
"We don't serve emacs users here"
"We don't serve zerg rushers here"
"We don't serve pubg players here"
"We don't serve Ayn Rand fans here"
"We don't serve sex offenders here"
"We don't serve bearded fellows here"
"We don't serve tank top wearers here"
"we don't serve smokers here"
"We don't serve short people here"
"We don't serve underhand servers here"
"We don't serve pedophobes here"
"We don't serve <subset of humans> here"
It doesn't matter. It is his choice and his business.
In the case at hand I think the court got it right. I sympathize with the sentiment that a business owner ought to be able to turn down business but I don’t deny that there are situations where this shouldn’t be the case.
This is at the very nature of the debate: Are people of different sexualities HUMAN rights, in EXACTLY the same way that people of different ethnicities are.
Because if they are, civil rights supercede religious rights. ("Your fist's freedom ends where my face begins")
Time and time again the US falls on the side that "no, gay people are not entitled to civil rights", diametrically opposite from every other western nation.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/gop-congressman...
I genuinely thought this ruling would go the other way, but I can appreciate why it didn’t. The demarcation of rights is fraught with complexity.
What if a business owner’s religion precludes then from serving a protected class or someone with a disability? Which takes precedence?
>The Colorado Court of Appeals ruled that Mr. Phillips’s free speech rights had not been violated, noting that the couple had not discussed the cake’s design before Mr. Phillips turned them down.
What a beautiful world would have been the German Nazis world. (sarcastic)