The court found her status as an artist excused her act of baking. It’s really that simple. The judge said so. Also, as cited, (Infra #965) SCOTUS has been very broad in it’s definition of freedom of expression cases.
I didn’t ask the question about fry cooks, someone else did. So, your sneering comment was out of line.
ETA, corrected post #.
Do you have a link?
like you say the statement is ambiguous. I don’t think a freedom of expression claim survives mere manufacturing.
That can’t be right. That would give every short order cook and craftsman the right o deny service to folks on a discriminatory basis.
Perhaps you should look at SCOTUS and their
“The Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment’s protection of artistic expression very broadly. It extends not only to books, theatrical works and paintings, but also to posters, television, music videos and comic books – whatever the human creative impulse produces.”
emph mine.
That refers to SCOTUS rulings.
ETA, cited in #965
Woolworths just got tired of the sit in and started serving blacks. Noone passed a law or got a court order. Then the sit in evaporated.
Does anyone else remember when the gay marriage debate was going on how the gay marriage proponents were saying how this wasn’t an imposition on anyone. Well, it turns out that gays want to impose on bigots who don’t want to rent out their churches to gay couples, don’t want to perform gay marriages, don’t want to make custom wedding cakes, don’t want to create floral arrangements, don’t want to have anything at all to do with a gay marriage.
Should churches be forced to allow gay marriages to take place in their sanctuary the way they are forced to take black or biracial couples if they offer their sanctuary for hire for wedding ceremonies?
Should a pastor that officiates weddings for people that are not in his congregation be forced to officiate a wedding for gay couples the same was he is forced to officiate weddings for biracial couples?
So where does it end?
You’re not fully understanding the *artistic expression *argument. Go back and review that because that’s where the case begins. It’s defined and discussed many times in this thread.
Soooo, your answer is “correct” or what?
As to your question about the chef vs. the hot dog vendor?
Could well be for the former, but not the latter. Would you be equally outraged if this chef refused to prepare *Bûche de noël et pigeon flambé au cognac *for (political jab redacted, but you get the idea).
Did the chef prepare it before? Is the chef unwilling to prepare a functionally identical dish for someone who is a member of a class protected by state law, due to membership in said class? If “yes” to both questions, then of course I’d consider it illegal discrimination.
Check the OP, dude.
What the fuck?
People claiming that it’s not an issue of speech because she chose NOT to speak, people quoting me saying it’s unambiguous and saying, “Like you say the statement is ambiguous”…this is some bizarro-land level argumentation, people.
We never doubted it was discrimination. It IS discrimination. But, in this case, it’s not actionable discrimination.
The same creative impulse. In this case, both are simply cooking. But that doesn’t matter anyway, because the baker here has the same problem as the baker in Masterpiece: there was no identifiable message she was being asked to convey.
So if I create a design for a t-shirt, each and every t-shirt that gets made with that design is now “an artistic endeavor”, even tho it’s a machine cranking out the identical t-shirts, in your view?
Again, again, again: if you may discriminate by invoking your right not to engage in speech, discrimination laws are gutted and useless.
You’ve said you think the decision doesn’t extend this far, but you haven’t explained how that’s possibly true. If it’s not “actionable” because of some bizarre argument that recreating a cake design counts as expressive speech, then no discrimination is truly actionable, as long as the bigot decides to exercise their right to remain silent as the means of discrimination.
Why is the message displayed important? It’s her status as an artist engaged in an artistic endeavor that excuses her discrimination, not a message or not.
Because the entire point of expression is to express an idea. If there is no idea, there is no expression. Unless you’re some sort of goddamned Lacanian poststructuralist or something.
Well your redaction seems to have made your post kind of indecipherable. My “outrage” is based on the fact that this judge’s interpretation leaves a barn door open as to what is an artist or what is expressive conduct. It also flies in the face of what other more weighty courts have decided. So it really has little to do with the fact that a gay couple were the injured party.
But I’m not really outraged. This is a rather meaningless decision and if this is how he rules on the actual case I suspect it won’t hold up.
The question isn’t, “Could a fry cook bake a wedding cake?” The question is, “Why does a wedding cake count as constitutionally protected speech, but a club sandwich does not?” It seems your answer is predicated on effort? It’s harder to make a wedding cake, therefore it’s more speechy?
Oh, we understand it. We just understand that it’s bullshit, entirely due to the facts in the case.
The judge in question really, really didn’t want to leave any loopholes for non-bigots to exploit. He didn’t want to leave the option for a claimant to say “The cake I’m asking for isn’t a work of art; it’s just a cake.” So there there are no lower limits on the artistic merit of the cakes in question. It’s not about creativity. It’s about wedding-cake-osity. That’s extremely explicit in the case: the cakes aren’t speech because they’re works of art, they’re speech because they’re wedding cakes and wedding cakes are magic.
This fact means that all arguments about the artistic merits of the cake are ignorant. They’re nonsensical garbage simply because they aren’t talking about the same thing the judge is talking about.
As it happens the judge would agree with you that fry cooks aren’t protected by his dumbass ruling - but he would disagree with you about why. The issue isn’t that french fries are insufficiently artistic - if that was the issue then the courts would have to come up with an objective measure for artistic creativity and there’s no way in hell he was doing that. No, the single solitary reason the french fries aren’t protected speech is because they’re not a wedding cake. That’s it. That’s the only reason.
If the fry cook stepped away from the cooker and whipped up a from-mix sheet cake, in a rectangular pan, and didn’t bother frosting it or decorating it in any way, that would be protected speech under the ruling - as long as he called it a wedding cake. (And didn’t put it in a display case, because those are magic too.)
Hell, the dude could probably whip up a batch of ordinary french fries and simply call them a wedding cake and they’d arguably be protected speech too. It ain’t like the judge put any limitations on the ingredients, preparation, or presentation required to qualify as a protected speech wedding cake in his ruling. All that matters is the role the ‘cake’ is in - or rather the one it’s slated to be in - which is to say, the name you call it by.
Reread the ruling where it differentiates between display cases items and items created for a specific customer’s needs.