A fair presentation by Adam Liptak in the NYT of what's at stake in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.
Jack Phillips bakes beautiful cakes, and it is not a stretch to call him an artist.... “It’s more than just a cake,” he said at his bakery one recent morning. “It’s a piece of art in so many ways.”
The couple he refused to serve, David Mullins and Charlie Craig, filed civil rights charges. They said they had been demeaned and humiliated as they sought to celebrate their union. “We asked for a cake,” Mr. Craig said. “We didn’t ask for a piece of art or for him to make a statement for us. He simply turned us away because of who we are.”
What is art? Why does it matter? Does artier artisan work get counted as speech?
“Because of my faith, I believe the Bible teaches clearly that it’s a man and a woman,” [said Mr. Phillips]. Making a cake to celebrate something different, he said, “causes me to use the talents that I have to create an artistic expression that violates that faith.”...
“Our story is about us being turned away and discriminated against by a public business,” said Mr. Mullins, 33, an office manager, poet, musician and photographer.
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220 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 220 of 220Remember when the gay rights movement was all about being left alone and being normal like everybody else?
Remember when they claimed that bullshit?
Yeah.
I didn't buy it for a second, and their totalitarian tactics now are all the proof we ever needed.
"just that there are different ways of looking at this truly difficult problem."
Oh, bullshit. It's not a truly difficult problem.
Somebody doesn't want to make you a wedding cake? Go somewhere else.
Stop being a fucking victim.
@Jupiter:
And no, homosexual marriage is not significant in the least, which is why those of us who think marriage *is* significant opposed, and continue to oppose, its extension to merely sexual unions. If someone sincerely wants to marry his dog, it can be argued that it is cruel not to let him. But this overlooks the damage done when the State establishes as legal fact, and further requires me to publicly attest, that my relation to my wife is the same as his relation to his dog.
Gay marriage does none of those things. Gay marriage extends certain legalistic rights to people in a union. You do not have to "publicly attest" to anything and in fact you are free to argue, agitate for, and be a spokesperson for the side that gay marriage is not equal to straight marriage. Let me ask you something. Since gay marriage has been a legal fact in the US, have you changed your behavior in any significant way as a result? Do you hold your marriage in less esteem? Do you question the validity of the vows you made to your partner when you got married? How could two gay women getting married have this kind of impact? Marriage is something that is recognized by the state but is not created by the state. It's reflection in law is a reflection of the way society arranges itself.
@CStanley:
I think those of you who don't have children who are teenagers right now have no clue how much our kids are being inundated with the message that heterosexual marriage is not the norm, and that people who believe that are hateful bigots. It's a very hostile environment for Christians trying to teach traditional values to our kids.
Then what you are really complaining about is society, not the state. If you feel that your children are being "inundated," then you should remove them from public school (advice I give everyone) and take charge of their education and inculturation. That's part of what responsible parenting entails.
"Homophobia is very evident in this thread today."
Nobody has a fear of homosexuality or homosexuals, you twit.
Some of us are simply fed up with being forced to celebrate things we don't approve.
But you're too bigoted to understand that.
Gospace said......if a Roman Catholic cake decorator refused to decorate a cake...
The Catholic church expects nothing less than mercy. A Christian may never desire the damnation of the evil doer. Charity requires that we will the good, especially the ultimate good, salvation, for every human being.
Christians get a bad rap, mostly from Protestants. The Catholics end up having to clean up the mess from these infidels.
Then what you are really complaining about is society, not the state.
I complain very much about society, but in this instance I'm complaining that the state is putting its finger on the scales. It may be true that it formerly had its finger on the other side (and having become convinced of that, I became an advocate of civil unions for all with marriage left alone as a religious institution.)
If you feel that your children are being "inundated," then you should remove them from public school (advice I give everyone) and take charge of their education and inculturation. That's part of what responsible parenting entails.
Oldest is an adult now, and both of the younger ones are in private school at great expense. Youngest is in Catholic school, but unfortunately our middle child has special needs that can't be accommodated there so he is in a private school with a culture that opposes our values so we do the best we can to explain our viewpoints. I have no idea of your personal situation but I tend to doubt that people who blithely give advice about taking charge of kids' inculturation have experience with teens who are being immersed in a culture that conflicts with religious upbringing right at the time that they have a natural and healthy tendency to pull back from their parents' value system. Progressives in the school system are exploiting that as they've done at an increasing pace for several generations now.
Stop being a fucking victim.
They want to be victims..that's where their power, prestige, self-esteem and often wealth come from.
@CStanley:
I have no idea of your personal situation but I tend to doubt that people who blithely give advice about taking charge of kids' inculturation have experience with teens who are being immersed in a culture that conflicts with religious upbringing right at the time that they have a natural and healthy tendency to pull back from their parents' value system.
No, I do not have any children of my own, but I have worked my entire professional life working with juveniles in the criminal justice and child welfare programs, as well as various initiatives with the public school system. My point is that society is changing. I happen to think that most of the social change since the early 1960s, while it has widened individual freedoms, has had a negative effect at the macro level. But gay marriage is a minuscule sideshow to this phenomenon.
And I have failed to bring up one argument mostly because I know the name tends to trigger a lot of commenters, but Andrew Sullivan's earliest arguments for gay marriage from a conservative perspective remain among the most persuasive ever written. Data suggests that millennial take marriage and children very seriously and are also very strong supporters of gay marriage. So it is not necessarily true that pro-gay must lead invariably to anti-family. Jonathan Rauch has also made a pro-family gay marriage argument, and Charles Murray (who has been sounding the alarm of family breakup for almost 40 years) supports gay marriage from this same perspective.
That right has never been available as an option in any society. Since Roman times, the individual serves society at the pleasure of the state.
Scratch a liberal, you'll find a f***ing fascist.
Every time
I like David Begley's comment about intellectual property and the very low threshold for legal protection on creative work. Copyrighting a cake is not hard and it establishes the maker as an artist. Which tees up the question: if we are prepared to give this protection to somebody's modest economic interest, why will we not extend at least that degree of protection to that same person's First Amendment interest? Will we see the Supreme Court in this case, interpret the artistic penumbra and define how arty the art must be in order to defend the artist for refusing to practice it?
There is a reason the law dislikes the equitable remedy of specific performance. Not only is it a PITA to define and supervise ("make the plaintiff a cake or go to jail! No, that's not creative enough! Try again! I can't tell you what will be good enough; but I'll know it when I see it."). It is also awfully like slavery.
How did freedom of conscience become inverted into bondage to assuage the feelings of a shopper who has no shortage of better choices?
Protected class, protected class. protected class.
In this case, a class of persons that not a single human on the planet can be excluded from. As long as they declare themselves, a member of the class.
The law is a fool.
Know what else is a protected class under the 1st amendment as well as the 15th?
Religion.
And expressly recognized by statute under RFRA.
Libtards think gays are the only people involved here with rights and it's absurd. But only one side is attempting to use coercion to force someone else into doing what they don't want to do.
CWJ - a perfect and succinct summary. This is the First World Problem par excellence, which is why gays don't go to bakeries run by adherents of a certain Third World cult.
If the bakery can be snared under the guise of being a "public business" which makes it sound as if it is one stop short of being a public utility, how is it that Google can decide to demonetise the videos on YouTube of which it disapproves? Leftists are always quick to point out that First Amendment rights don't mean a private business has to provide you with a platform for your views, but if the bakery made the cake, it would be providing the very message to be conveyed, the cake being one of the most symbolic elements of a wedding.
It says something about the modern distortion of the first amendment that bakers are using the free speech argument rather that the right to practice your faith. The Founders had religious practice first for a reason. The balance is between freedom of conscience and public access to services. Loss of a wedding cake by a particular baker is not a serious deprivation certainly not compared to forcing someone to act against their beliefs, but there is little respect for faith, or the text of the Constitution, in our judiciary.
It's laughable to me that the gay couple feels degraded because a guy wouldn't bake them a cake. It's a cake. Maybe I just don't get the whole marriage industry thing.
Anyway, no one should want the baker to lose in this case. Aptly argued above by many.
Others have pointed to the contradiction in the plaintiffs' argument. They want to eat their cake and have it too: on thecone hand, they invoke "commerce" and "public accommodation" to emphasize how fungible and commoditized is the product they seek, so the baker who seeks the benefits of being in a public business must serve all comers. On the other hand they emphasize the unique personal experience of *their* Big Day and *their* trauma at having *this* baker refuse to provide them with *his special* cake.
If the cake is a commodity, they suffer no great trauma, beyond walking down the street to buy the desired product from this guy's competitor. If instead the cake is unique and they are shattered by his refusal, then the cake is art, his making it is deeply personal and involves him in their ritual, and he can invoke his First Amendment defense.
This dilemma seems clear enough (at last! I'm slow). But it may escape the Supremes. They may see this as a great excuse to step on the boundary of religious belief in a secular world. If they do, however, I see no sanctuary for commercial concerns like FaceBook or Google who decide to censor content they don't like. The whole "bulletin board" defense could fall over.
The purchase of a custom cake, to be delivered and/or consumed offsite at a future date, is not a public accommodation. It's a private contract.
R.J. Chatt said...
It's called having common sense. If a straight couple came into the Christian bakery and tried to order a wedding cake for their gay friends' wedding the order would be declined because of the opposition to homosexuality not to the customer.
I would reframe it as "the opposition to gay marriage" rather than to homosexuality per se. That's the point. But this is a great hypothetical illustrating why the refusal to provide services for a gay marriage is not discrimination against gay people per se. Just as refusing to bake a cake for (forgive the unpleasant absurdity) a black man who wanted to celebrate Ted Kennedy's achievement at Chappaquiddick would not be racial discrimination.
It is sad that the idea of compelling speech in service of a viewpoint the speaker does not approve has somehow become acceptable to a large number of people in our society, in the name of non-discrimination.
And frankly, it doesn't matter whether the person's beliefs about being implicated in approving of an event/message are considered reasonable by the rest of us. What matters is that he or she sincerely believes it. It shouldn't even require a religious component to rule in favor of the cake baker. Compelling speech is un-American.
Etienne said...
The state has no right, or even the will, to define what a marriage is to the religions who perform such ceremonies.
That's coming. Give it 5 years, until the very wealthy gay rights lobby groups decide it's time. Rod Dreher's Law of Merited Impossibility will kick in.
Does an artist have a right to refuse a commission? I don't think anyone involved in any of these "Bake our cake, H8er!1!!eleventy!!!!" cases refused to sell anything in the ready-made case to anyone. The hitch has always been refusing to make a custom cake (and yes, it is arty, try making one yourself) for a ceremony they were not on board with.
All of this, of course raises the question as to why the QUILTBAG community of Michigan isn't laying siege to Dearborn, but of course they aren't because "Shut up, that's why..." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgWIhYAtan4 if you're unfamiliar)
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