> It doesn't make sense that as a baker I can be forced to bake gay wedding cakes,
In the UK you're not forced to bake gay wedding cakes. You have the choice to bake cakes and not bake any wedding cakes at all. What you can't do if you're a business is refuse to provide cakes to people because they have (or you perceive them to have) a protected characteristic.
>The actual baker situation was denying a customer based on their sexual orientation. That type of refusal is not okay and the reason why is pretty well-established in the law. Sexual orientation (like religion, race, sex, etc) is protected from such discrimination.
This is not true. They were perfectly happy to bake a cake for gay people; they objected to baking the cake specifically for a gay wedding. The cake was to have wording which the bakers disagreed with for religious reasons.
> "I will not sell you that cake because you're gay" is the issue, not the type of cake.
This contradicts everything I've read about the case.
The baker disagreed with gay marriage, not being gay.
To suggest that the baker wouldn't have sold any cake to a gay customer is ridiculous.
>can a bakery deny service based on sexual preference.
It is a little more nuanced than that. Bakeries were not denying anybody based on sexual orientation.
If a gay man went to get a straight wedding cake, a non-wedding cake, or a wedding cake for a gay wedding that did not have anything to indicate it was for a gay wedding the bakers would not have denied them.
> Why not? Cooking is as much of an art as baking a cake and ergo they should have the right to deny serving you food under their right to free expression.
Except it wasn't.
If you know the cake case, they ruled that there was nothing wrong because they offered to sell them an off the shelf cake, they just refused to write a message they didn't support.
> Masterpiece's owner Jack Phillips, who is a Christian, declined their cake request, informing the couple that he did not create wedding cakes for marriages of gay couples owing to his Christian religious beliefs, although the couple could purchase other baked goods in the store.[0]
> But forcing people to make cakes they feel morally icky about sounds like a guaranteed way to get some really ugly, half-assed cakes. Whether we like it or not that they feel that way doesn't seem to matter because an ugly cake that validates me is still an ugly cake.
I don't know the details of the case but I think there is a clear line between refusing to do usual service because somebody is from a protected group. Like a ordinary wedding cake only because the person ordering is gay.
vs
Refusing to create a wedding cake because it is offensive. Like customer asking for a cake in a shape of penis or something offending the artist.
> Other than my agreeing with the moral position in this case, how is this different than a baker not making a cake for some particular customer?
> We can’t reasonably be making “this type of refusal to do business is okay, but that one is not” based on moral agreements of individuals
We actually can. And the difference between this and the baker is in the details you omitted.
The actual baker situation was denying a customer based on their sexual orientation. That type of refusal is not okay and the reason why is pretty well-established in the law. Sexual orientation (like religion, race, sex, etc) is protected from such discrimination.
And the baker was allowed to not serve the gay wedding anyways! Despite that!
Being pro-life is not a protected attribute. You could argue these pro-life beliefs are due to religion..but this isn't about Jesus Christ Himself. This is a political opinion derived from the church that plenty of Christians don't have.
>So, what if one’s religion doesn’t let you sell cakes to Infidels, or Jews, or blacks?
They court will rule against you. In this case, the bakery didn't refuse to serve them, but refused a particular service it didn't offer to anyone, gay wedding cakes. The question was, given that they offered a straight version of that service, should they be forced to offer the gay version. But even then the ruling is narrow enough it likely won't be applicable to a similar case in the future.
> bakeries can decide whether they can sell cakes to gay folks. What’s so hard about this ?
I had to look this up and it took a while to find the answer. There is no clear decision to say whether bakeries can reuse to sell cakes to gay people.
> If a business refuses to bake a cake for black people's weddings, is that okay?
The critical distinction here is that your sexual orientation does force you to marry someone of a particular sex. It is perfectly possible for a homosexual (or bisexual) individual to marry someone of the opposite sex, and it is perfectly possible for a heterosexual to marry someone of the same sex. Masterpiece Cakeshop and 303 Creative's owners (to reference the highest-profile cases) refused to service weddings because the prospective spouses were of the same sex, not because they were homosexual. (In contrast, if a black person gets married, that will always be a "black person's wedding", so refusing to service it on that basis would be racially discriminatory.)
>We also have a bunch of reasons (protected classes) that a company cannot refuse to do business. Colorado specifically includes sexual orientation in their definition of protected classes.
I don't think this is relevant to this specific case. The baker didn't refuse to do business with the gay couple. He was happy to sell them a generic off-the-shelf wedding cake.
He refused to sell them a personalized cake, which is considered a form of expression. The government cannot compel you to express yourself a certain way if it goes against your religious beliefs.
> Go back to 2006 or so and tell them that in a decade, bakeries would be getting sued for not catering gay weddings.
Why would I do that? I'm fine with bakeries getting sued for not catering gay weddings, that's one of the advantages of living in a normal society: the ability to petition the courts to seek redress.
It wasn't about denying someone a cake. The shop had many premade cakes available for purchase. It was about being forced to create a custom LGBT themed cake that the gay couple wanted baked.
If you believe they should have been forced to do that you are an authoritarian.
>What the baker was not willing to do was bake them the exact cake that they wanted, claiming that fancier cakes were artistic expression and not the same as the standard priced on their menu cakes, and that forcing them to create an art piece cake they didn't want to make was the equivalent of compelled speech
This is just semantics of a legal argument. It is not some universal truth that ordering off menu puts any additional ethical strain on someone. If the baker would make those customizations for a straight couple and not a gay couple then the civil rights of the gay couple are being infringed.
> The recent case with the baker was extending the protection of human rights to gay couples.
He offered to sell them a pre-made cake (in compliance with non-discrimination laws). The question was whether he could be compelled to perform an act of speech (custom-making a cake) that violated his sincerely-held religious beliefs.
> That is extremely inconsistent and evidence of bias and prejudice in the local enforcement of law.
That is not inconsistent, as one is denying someone based on what they are, and the other is denying someone based on harassment. The gay couple didn't ask the baker to write on the cake that heterosexuality was immoral. There's an obvious difference between affirming the culture of the customer, and antagonistically denying the culture of the producer.
And I do think think that the baker's refusal was about what they are, since the conditions to bake the cake required that it didn't acknowledge what they are. It's like saying, "I will bake a cake for a black person, but only if it doesn't reference black culture in any way."
In the UK you're not forced to bake gay wedding cakes. You have the choice to bake cakes and not bake any wedding cakes at all. What you can't do if you're a business is refuse to provide cakes to people because they have (or you perceive them to have) a protected characteristic.
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