Well, at least there is a cake boss joke in here somewhere…
Did some gay people say they were gay and wanted to buy a cake?
OR did some gay people want to buy a cake and say it was for a gay wedding…
Not exactly the same thing.
The cake itself communicated no different message. If you looked at two cakes baked by the same baker, one of which was for a straight couple and one of which was for a gay couple, there would be no difference by which you could tell which was which.
Unless, of course, the baker put it there herself–which would be just as discriminatory as if I, when waiting tables, insisted on shouting slurs at my Muslim customers but was kind and polite to my Christian customers.
Well, no, but that is because you asked a completely unrelated question.
If your first line had said, and they “wanted to buy a wedding cake”, then they would be the same thing.
Did they want a cake that was in any way unique or different from any other cake that the baker would make for a straight wedding?
It is pretty much the exact same thing.
I think a lot of people are forgetting that this is a county level court decision on a preliminary injunction. If anyone thinks that an actual verdict on the case which includes “cake making being the greatest form of expressive conduct” survives a single higher court judgment in frigging California, I got a bridge to sell you. I am looking at you Morgenstern. All these guys acting like lawyers in this thread patently ignoring the opposite decision in the Colorado Court of Appeals and pretending the SC final decision won’t have an effect on California, fucking laughable.
Thanks–I noticed that, but figured maybe there was some reason it was being taken so seriously that I was missing.
Yeah, the article says the next hearing is in June but the defense may ask for a dismissal “because of the strength of Lampe’s ruling.”
Yes, I finally arsed myself to read the article.I feel none the richer for it.
As far as the cake is concerned it’s EXACTLY the same thing. Regardless of how pissed off the religious baker is that they’re being asked to do their job, the cake is exactly the same.
Which matters because the moronic argument in question is that the cake, itself, is speech.
Two identical cakes, which could be swapped without anybody telling the difference, must by definition be sending the same message - if the cake itself is speech. Which, again, is the moronic argument in question.
Again, don’t blame me for this. Blame the judge who was trying to grossly twist the law with his interpretation thereof and caused the rivets to pop out of it in the process.
The object is not the idea being communicated. Two identical cakes can make two different statements. If I bake one to serve at your gay wedding and I bake one to serve at my Black Mass (you need it as part of the human sacrifice), am I saying the same things with our identical cakes?
Absolutely you are. You are saying “Here’s your cake, give me money.”
For the person who actually made it, absolutely. You made a cake, if you make another cake that is identical, you made the same cake.
If there is no difference between the cakes, then there is no difference in the artist expression of the baker.
I don’t know that it was necessary to try to play an emotional card by comparing a SSM to human sacrifice though.
Context is everything. An object and an action can mean different things.
Example 1. Two students burn a flag to protest Trump’s policies = Republicans are outraged and want their heads.
Example 2. Two Boy Scouts burn a flag because it touched the ground = Republicans praise them for adhering to flag etiquette
Send me an email.
I’ve sent you 2 already.
PS…I think your bias is showing…bad move for a mod.
What artistic expression is involved in the store owner selling the flags to the two seperate groups?
Let me ask you this then. Would you ever support a law that required someone to surrender their 1st Amendment rights in order to own a business baking wedding cakes?
PPS… are your and the mods circling wagons as I speak?
Can you articulate what such a law would look like?
An action can mean two separate things - which is why the baker shouldn’t offer any service that could be construed to send a message they don’t want to, should that service be purchased by somebody doing something they don’t like. For example, mutely delivering a cake, or perhaps just requiring it to be picked up, doesn’t show any sort of significant support for the wedding - any rational person would realize that you just did a contracted job. (Admittedly “rational person” might not include the baker in question.) On the other hand you probably shouldn’t include cakes emblazoned with “Christy Christian’s Bakery Endorses this Wedding” in your standard book of decoration patterns.
Just selling somebody a plain cake (or even a fancy, completely non-denominational cake) doesn’t send any message other than perhaps “I’m an awesome cake maker” and “I comply with the law about selling things in an unbigoted way.”
I freely concede that that last message might be the kind of message a bigot doesn’t want to send (lest they attract more gay customers and have to stand in the same room as them), but the state has a simple, legal remedy - stop selling wedding cakes entirely. If you don’t like that, if you want to play in the big boy wedding cake league, you need to suck it up and play ball.
I get that for the impassioned religious person it feels like an unjust limitation to, say, allow gay people to go about their business without being harassed and attacked until the decide to play along and stop existing. However this sort of limitation is what modern society requires of people.
It could be argued that the act of selling a flag to someone knowing they are going to deface it or the more likely context refusing to sell someone a flag because the merchant believes the customer is going to deface is an action that falls under free speech protection. If the object in question to be sold is something that is the artist’s original creation the need for creative protection becomes even more imperative.
And me?