At least I understand your position now. I suspect this will have to be a case of agree to disagree. I believe in the old adage “Your right to freely swing your fist ends at my nose.” I have no problem with a person exercising their right to religion, but if in the exercising of those rights they discriminate against others, that is a step too far. Or to put it another way, I don’t believe anybody has the right to “punch somebody in the nose” with their religion. If a religion cannot co-exist as we as a people grow up, to use your words, then it must stand aside. Society cannot be held back by ancient scriptures and cultural practices. The rights for people to live free from being punched in the nose by people who simply cannot grow up and recognize their fundamentals rights are the ones who must give way to those of us who can. And ultimately, that means by force of law, because they certainly won’t on their own.
His god through his book says gays are bad. If he doesn’t follow what his god says he goes to hell. Yet, your contention is that regardless of what his god says he just hates gays. He should just suck it up and stick two dudes on the top of the cake and go to hell?
Your quote seems to have got a bit mangled there so I’m not sure who you’re replying to, but I don’t think the Bible has much to say about wedding cakes or sticking little statuettes on top of them. If the baker is truly worried about the fate of his immortal soul, he had better get with the program, and understand that the guy requesting the gay wedding cake is an abomination in the eyes of God and must be put to death (cite: “Leviticus 20:13 If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.”).
With that marvelous edict in mind, I’m curious how you reconcile religious belief with the mores of 21st century civilization.
Are you saying that it is justified to hate someone because you read it in a book somewhere that thousands of years ago, someone said that god said that gays are bad?
Is there no personal ownership in that belief?
As mind reading technology doesn’t exist, I judge people based on their actions. If you consistently act like a bigoted jackass, I’m going to say that you are in fact a bigot. The fact that you justify your bigotry with ‘god told me to’ isn’t relevant in the least. Same thing with applying laws; if you murder a pagan citing “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” that doesn’t mean you avoid a conviction for murder.
Further, if I was to examine the claim that “his god through his book says gays are bad” to exonerate him, I could not simply accept it at face value. I would instead need to examine the book, and we start to see gross inconsistencies in his position. Why does he choose the ‘no homo’ instruction, but not the ‘no mixed fabrics’ one - presumably he doesn’t mind making a cake for someone planning to wear a poly-cotton blend at the wedding, right? Why does he ignore that his god later told him that Leviticus no longer applies? It’s pretty obvious with even a light examination that he doesn’t actually act in a manner consistent with the ‘god told me’ line.
I think he should go to hell for the blasphemy of claiming that he can pick and choose which commands from god to follow and which he can just ignore. As Wolfpup pointed out, by refusing to serve them instead of putting them to death our baker is disobeying his god, so he’s going to hell anyway.
I don’t see what’s hard to understand about it being a topic with room for reasonable disagreement to begin with. What’s the ‘fist’ and what’s the ‘face’ are subject to definition on which reasonable people can disagree, as well as what factors make it desirable for society to use the last resort (it should at least be the last resort) of state compulsion against people to get them to act as some or even the majority wish.
As to where the beliefs come from, I think there’s a persistent problem here which probably needs a name. The assumption we’re sitting around talking about how to design a society when there’s never been one. Only in this artificial framework can the religious tradition of the entire society for centuries (Judeo-Christian, applies to Islam also) be treated as equivalent to ‘well what I invent a religion that says [any arbitrary] X’. One might not want there to be any traditional religious component in society. That’s OK as an aspiration, but for now there is as there always has been. The concept of free exercise of religion under US constitutional law wouldn’t need a name if it was exactly the same as one’s general right to expression, privacy, etc. or if religious belief was whatever anyone said it was starting yesterday rather than being limited to at least somewhat long running and deeply embedded traditions. So again it’s kind of fake incredulity that respect for religious belief would have any influence on anything. Although it doesn’t dictate everything. It is just one factor, that doesn’t equal zero, in constitutional law.
Similarly for instant theology where one looks up the common English translation of Leviticus 20:13 then declares that a Christian should believe they are going to hell if they don’t kill gays. Obviously that’s partly a derisive joke mocking other people’s beliefs, but it’s pretty ridiculous all around. Again we didn’t start yesterday but with centuries of theology about the non-simple relationship between Old Testament and New Testament provisions in Christianity; Judaism and Islam have their own evolving interpretations of their partly overlapping texts. And there are questions of the translation and context of the OT sayings (as well as NT ones too like Paul’s negative references to homosexuality). There’s always room for criticizing particular religious interpretations or all religion, but in fact it’s well within the Christian mainstream (which I guess everyone besides kidding around actually knows) to just respectfully decline to participate in a same sex marriage ceremony. Again the issue is what compelling reason to use state coercion against that, without phony hypotheticals. There might be such an argument based on offsetting responsibilities a person takes on hanging out a shingle as a business open to the public. But ‘doesn’t Christianity say kill homosexuals anyway?’ is non-serious.
On an issue who real seriousness on the pro-state coercion side isn’t totally obvious to begin with, if it has to basically seek out exceptional business owners who decline to provide a very narrow range of services other business owners will readily provide. The compelling societal need to apply state coercion isn’t well answered IMO in this case, and dubious slippery slope arguments don’t get there either. And if a broader USSC decision in favor of such business owners were to come it would probably turn in part on that issue of narrow services and small scale, besides the issue of expressive content of the narrow services.
No, not exactly. Instead, he and his pastor need to admit that either God was wrong or God’s messenger was wrong or God was never there. When God’s message is wrong, then God’s message gets thrown out.
We have no problem doing this with the Taliban. Just we have our own “Taliban-style Christians” (including cake baker man) and it’s time to deal with them in the same way.
Room for reasonable disagreement on exactly what? Please be specific.
I don’t believe you have effectively argued that a caterer is participating in any ceremony.
(That’s leaving aside the fact that not all marriages are Christian ceremonies anyway. What harm could possibly accrue to a non-bigoted Christian to share in a civil ceremony that does not purport to be a religious marriage? The idea that all marriages are marriages before God is very much NOT within the Christian mainstream.)
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Also, a wedding cake is for the reception, not for the ceremony. It’s not like the caterer witnesses the vows of every couple who gets married.
And - definitely not a stupid question in this context - does the same caterer take the same care to avoid serving Jews, or (considering how he’s likely to feel about it) Catholics?
And the baker typically doesn’t go to the wedding or reception as part of his professional responsibility. In fact, unless someone were to volunteer the information, there’s no reason for the baker to know anything about the happy couple, including their orientation and gender. Which makes me think it’s none of his business.
And I have a hard time taking a cake seriously as art because it gets cut up and eaten during the ceremony. It’s food. Expensive, pretty and elaborately decorated food - but still food.
It’s not ridiculous at all. If your claim is that ‘god told me to do X through this book, if I don’t do it then I’m going to Hell’, then my going to the text of the book to examine what god said to you is perfectly reasonable. When it turns out that you’re actually picking and choosing which parts of the book to follow and that the book doesn’t actually say anything remotely like ‘if you bake a cake for a gay wedding, you’re going to hell’, it completely demolishes the claim that you’re simply a pawn following the dictates of a higher power and that you shouldn’t be held responsible for doing what you say the invisible man told you to do.
The fact that there are centuries of tradition behind picking and choosing which parts of the Bible to choose doesn’t change that at all. Either literally follow what’s actually in the Bible, or admit that what you follow is based on your own mind, and not simply dictated by a higher power.
It’s completely serious. If you claim that you can’t be held responsible for your disgusting, bigoted stance because the Bible tells you to hold it, then it’s perfectly reasonable for us to look to what the Bible says. It’s hilarious to me how badly it bothers people trying to hide behind religion for people to actually read their own holy book.
Often times, they are not even held in the same building at all. When I was working in hotels, we did tons of wedding receptions, but no weddings.
Not defending the notion that bronze age superstitions are a reasonable grounds for justifying discrimination here, but it should be noted that most people don’t follow what is in their bible, most of them haven’t even read it past a few favorite passages, but instead, follow what some person that they have decided speaks for god tells them what the bible tells them to do.
It does seem a bit far fetched, but that is their defense that they don’t follow what is actually written in the bible, but instead, only follow the parts of the bible that match their preferences. Due to the fairly wide latitude that is given to anything that is claimed to be religious in nature, they get away with it more often than not.
So, because people of a certain group in the past have done bad things, it is acceptable to do the same bad things to the people in that group now. Individuals in a group have done things you don’t like, so all people in the group deserve punishment.
They did it to us, so we should do it to them.
Revenge. Because that never causes backlash and makes things worse.
You consider being expected to treat people with equity and respect to be a bad thing that is levied as a punishment toward bigots?
Sorry, I was unaware the Gays were refusing to let Straights get married, and Blacks were forcing Whites to sit at the back of the bus. I for one am appalled by such actions and call for it to stop immediately.
I’m sorry, “the same bad things?” Where is the push by LGBT rights groups to strip Christian families of their children? Where is the push by by queers to ban Christian marriage? Where have we tried to keep Christians out of schools? Have we ever tried to ban Christians for the Boy Scouts? Has any prominent gay rights proponent ever argued that God devastated a city because they had too many Christians living in it? Have we sent missionaries to Africa, instructing their governments on how to more effectively oppress Christians? How many Christians have ended up in a hospital because a bunch of queers caught them walking out of a Church?
Christians like yourself have attacked openly gay people relentlessly, without pity or mercy or compassion, for fucking decades. Gay rights protections aren’t about attacking you, they are about protecting us from you. Your attempt to equate the two in any measure is fucking nauseating, but utterly unsurprising, given the position you’re attempting to advocate in this thread.
Now, having shot down your attempt to distract from the actual point of my last post, I’ll restate it here, again, so no one is fooled by your attempted misdirection:
“Identity politics” were an invention of the right. Republicans spent decades crafting an “us versus them” narrative, where “us” was “Good Christian Americans,” and “them” was “godless fags who want to prey on your children.” That’s precisely where gay identity politics started - when we realized that our survival depended on not letting people like you define us in the public sphere.
/epicsmackdown
Despite very high-rates of mostly gay-caused syphilis in USA and Canada we are being forced to accept LGBT standpoints. New here.
We can tell. And I’m sure you have actual cites proving that you a) have high rates of syphilis and b) they are caused by “gays”.