Serious question(s): Upon having their cake order rejected, can you see how a gay couple might feel humiliated, demeaned, etc? Can you see how they might feel their rights were violated? And while it might not be the course you would take, can you envision how someone who feels this way might seek redress via the legal system?
Yes. I can see how they could feel that. We should try not to injure each other.
However, I think they’re going to loose their case. We need to be able to make exceptions sometimes. As you know, not all LGBT rights activists think they did the right thing to sue the baker.
Maybe it’s because I worked in “food service” during high school, but I can’t think of much I’d care for less than food served/made by someone against his will.
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Let me add that I sure as hell don’t want to eat food that someone didn’t want to make for me…
(…just sayin’…)
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The EEOC isn’t the final arbiter of this question any more than your local prosecutor is the final arbiter of your search and seizure rights - the EEOC is an advocate that can charge and sue you, but it isn’t the law of the land.
The sexual orientation and transgender additions to protected classes are holdovers from the arbitrary inventions of the Obama administration. Courts are split on the issue, and should it percolate up SCOTUS, there’s little reason to believe the court will read those altogether new protected classes into existing law.
Again, it’s messy, and the question has not been settled. And to suggest the EEOC has settled it is to misunderstand what EEOC does.
Yeah, no there’s not - heterosexual institutions weren’t set up to stick it to gays, their creation was to reinforce certain aspects of heterosexual relationships that were rationally related to perfectly viable ends needed for society. Contrast that to actual, ill-intentioned supremacy done on behalf of whites done to keep blacks as second class citizens.
It’s not even a comparison, the motives aren’t and never have been the same.
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Obergefell v. Hodges isn’t reason enough to countenance the possibility?
I would contend that ill-intentioned acts have been done to keep gays as second class citizens. But if you find heterosexual supremacy a bridge too far, how about heterosexual privilege instead?
Blacks were subhuman because of their supposed inherent intellectual limitations; gays, by dint of their ineluctable moral depravity.
Different motives I suppose–but a difference of no consequence.
Powerpuff: I know you live in California. Are you, your family, and home out of harms way?
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Yes. I feel bad for anyone who couldn’t see that.
No. Strictly by virtue of wandering into a bakery I am now owed service or goods by the baker. No contract or agreement was met. Economic activity is not only facilitated via monetary exchange, it’s sufficient but not necessary - especially at the level which the local baker operates.
Yes. People are emotional and sometimes let their emotions control them rather than control their emotions. I’d imagine the gay couple think their helping further the cause of justice, or else why would they put themselves through what they are. However, that does not mean I agree with their logic, but I can understand it.
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What if the baker refused to serve them because they were black?
Abso-fucking lutely not. “That guy doesn’t share my world view or condone my lifestyle. What an affront! He must be punished! We’ll sue until he’s either re-educated or bankrupt.”
This is histrionic snowflake logic. You have no right to the labor of another private citizen. The whole fun of a free society and business is transactions free of coercion and mutually beneficial. No judge or court anywhere should have ever heard this case. Get the fuck over it and find another baker.
Same question to you: Would your response be the same if the baker refused to serve them because they were black?
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Yes. Find another baker, you probably don’t want a cake from Bigot Cakes Inc. Post on social media. Picket the place if you feel like it.
But using government to force a citizen to provide products/services they don’t want to… That’s wrong. That won’t make them accept you. And it makes the plaintiff look petty.
Freedom. It isn’t always pretty. Sometimes people suck. Ignore people who don’t accept you and move on.
Ah. So you’re another ‘anti Civil Rights Act’ libertarian type.
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So in response to me saying there weren’t any actual religious objections by white supremacists in your Jim Crow analogy…instead of pulling from widely respected and understood views of Christianity, your response was to pull a recognized terrorist belief structure to prop up in your defense? If the subject were science instead of religion what you posted would be recognized as a conspiracy theory.
No, thanks. Swing and a hard miss on that one, and I think you’re attempting to bait people on that. What you did is like Zep pointing to the 1 in 10 million people that gets a reaction from vaccines and dies as proof that vaccines are worthless and Big Pharma is trying to kill us for profit.
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When blacks were denied their rights to vote and denied equal protection under the law by southern democrats their constitutional rights were being violated (civil liberties). There was no need to invent “civil rights” as a new form of positive rights.
We’ve done the whole civil liberties vs civil rights to death for hundreds of posts. As I recall we disagreed.
The way civil rights law works now is that a civil right is anything a protected group demands and the federal government agrees to. For instance: coercing private businesses to serve you against their will. That’s a win for liberty.
So if I’m reading you right, you’re affirming my statement about your orientation, yes?
And you’re wrong when you say there was no need to posit positive rights, because during Jim Crow, blacks were systematically excluded from huge swaths of society, with demonstrably ill effects on them as a class. In terms of the present topic, it wasn’t the case of a lone baker refusing to serve them–it was akin to every baker in the state refusing to do so.
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Hello, Idaho. All safe here. Thank you.
We’re in coastal hills with a lot of open space behind us so we do worry a bit in these conditions. You picture cool breeze coming off the water. Instead, we have Santa Ana winds, which means lots of hot air blowing from the desert to the coast. It’s been close to 80 degrees, and sooo dry.
No, they’re unrelated. OvH involved constitutional rights, and SCOTUS ruled the law (basically) impermissibly treated unlike things alike. Title VII is a statute, there is no constitutional right against discrimination in commerce and employment. Congress enacts the statute and creates such rights, or doesn’t, or changes the statute. In theory, Congress could repeal all of the CRA.
Congress is therefore responsible for which classes get protected and which do not, and despite OvH and general modern acceptance of gays, Congress has never added sexual orientation to Title VII. And the idea that the statute “evolved” to cover new categories Congress has never decided to add isn’t going to win at SCOTUS.
Nor should it. The solution is winning seats in Congress and getting laws passed through democracy.
In no moral universe are the people who can’t command a baker on the spot to bake a cake for a gay wedding in the same moral universe as people who suffered the business end of Bull Connor’s attack dogs, lynchings, and baseball bats on the Edmund Pettis bridge at Selma. No, not only different motives, but different experiences.
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Precisely. There needs to be a thoughtful armistice on this stuff so our commitment to a new principle doesn’t start creating absurd results. Your example and others like it who have been posted show where this leads.
If it ever becomes egregious (e.g., classes of people being frozen out of vital services they can’t access) then we cross that bridge when we come to it.
But we’re not there yet, and till then, it’s perfectly ok for people to respectfully agree to allow space for differences.
Which, by the way, used to be the Alpha and Omega of two social goals of Tolerance and Diversity. It’s perverse how far we’ve veered from that.
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Well, no, there are lots of intervening factors - but Boomers consistently ignored the mounting problems in favor of voting themselves ever-expanding goodies. In addition to ignoring the demographic crisis of SS, they added (massive unfunded liability) Medicare Part D to mix of entitlements. The list goes on and on. Theirs will be a legacy of mismanagement that will take decades to clean up. And at a time and an election (2016) when we should have started moving on from that generation’s leadership, we hire another one (Trump) to keep the bad governance flowing. (And say what you want about Trump’s many vices, one of them is that he is pure Boomer in distilled archetypal form - narcissistic, a wastrel happy to spend other people’s money, unable to see past the instantaneous, and entitled.)
I’m all for means-testing. We can’t afford a general pension, and SS wasn’t intended to be that. I think the retirement age has to come up, although, ironically, the business lobby may push back on that (they don’t want old workers hanging around longer for lots of reasons, mainly insurance costs). Taxes will have to be raised, but I’d like to see some changes to re-incentivize personal saving for retirement (the incentives now are paltry).
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