The link above is to an older story, can’t find news reports on the latest victory for the company involved, but a link to the actual Court of Appeals decision is here:
But the interesting part is that it seems that the company’s precedent of not printing ANY messages they found offensive, such as curse words or endorsements of strip clubs, helped them in the case.
What also helped is that unlike baking a cake, a T-shirt actually contains speech endorsing or criticizing a point of view, and no one can be forced to do that.
There’s going to be a lot of court cases like this in coming years, not just on gay rights issues, but also on contraception and abortion. It seems to me pretty clear cut that if a business is privately held and has a consistent record of being run in accordance with a particular faith, that great deference should be shown in letting them continue to operate in accordance with their faith. The last thing this country needs is more godless people running our corporations, and I say that as an atheist.
“Sir, did you not, on May 6th, 2015, did you print a shirt for Sally Jones that said, “#1 Grandmother?” Do you really expect this court to believe that you think Sally Jones, whom you’d never met before that day, was the best grandmother in the world? Your honor, I submit that the defendant regularly prints messages he doesn’t support! This whole line of defense is bunk!”
But seriously, fuck those bigot assholes. I hope their store fails.
I second the fucking of those bigot assholes; but the verdict seems correct to me too.
The obvious comparison is to the bakery that refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple. A fine distinction needs to be drawn, and I think these two cases probably draw the line in the right place.
In the case of the wedding cake, the baker was refusing to provide an essentially identical product to a gay couple, solely because that couple was gay. Even if the cake were customized to the couple, to the extent of putting two model grooms or two men’s names on it, it’s still essentially the same product that would be provided to a male-female couple. The difference in decoration is solely a natural consequence of the gay couple’s identity, it is not an explicit social or political statement, so I think the baker cannot decline to make it.
But I do think a baker should have the right to decline to produce customized cakes with explicit and generalized social or political statements such as “Gay Pride” or “Heil Hitler”. And that seems to be analogous to this t-shirt case. And I’m not convinced about the idea that such a business should be forced to be all-or-none about “controversial” social/political material. After all, we certainly allow a “Christian Bookshop” to stock only books with a certain political/social slant.
A different but equally fine distinction seems to be needed about the level of active involvement of the business owner in production. On the one hand we would allow a Christian bookshop, so by extension we would presumably allow a Christian bookshop that has no stock on its shelves but prints only Christian books on demand from electronic files, whether or not those electronic files are provided by the customer. Yet I think we’d feel that it’s not acceptable for a general print shop to prevent a customer from using their photocopier to copy political flyers, whether those flyers say “We Love Jesus”, “Gay Pride” or “Hitler Youth”. Both of these situations seem motivated by free speech concerns, yet they seem to yield opposite conclusions based solely on a rather fuzzy sense of how much the business owner is actively involved in production.
The matter was in the state of Kentucky. The case was brought by Lexington Fayette Urban County Human Rights Commission which had ordered the business to produce custom printed t-shirts for a Gay Pride event.
The Commission could appeal again to the Kentucky Supreme Court. I’m not sure of that court’s make up or political leanings. Or an appeal to the Federal Courts could be pursued. But I’m not sure the Commission would want to go the federal route at the risk of failing and setting a wider precedent than they might like to see come down.
A somewhat analogous case out of Colorado is awaiting a response on a petition for cert to the US Supreme Court.
Maybe this will reassure people that no one’s going to force bakers to make gay wedding cakes in the shape of penises, or any of the other things hard-core Christians got so worked up about after the “Religious Freedom” laws got struck down.
Well, the business won’t fail for the same reason that kosher restaurants don’t fail despite primarily appealing to Jews and not the wider public. Churches and Christian orgs have more than enough events that justify printing T-shirts to keep them in business.
Their website clearly says “Christian outfitters”, which makes me wonder if GLSO(the gay rights org that wanted the T-shirts) singled them out to create a test case. Lexington is a big place, there are plenty of secular T-shirt makers in the city. Actually, I don’t wonder, it seems that GLSO actually was targeting them. Which makes me think that they are the assholes who should go out of business.
For me, the argument that a cake constitutes speech failed on the grounds that I’ve never seen a cake that communicated a whole lot. You show me a mural that’s covered in rainbows, and featured lots of happy same sex couples, I’m gonna think, “Whoever painted that really likes gay people.” You show me a rainbow cake with two grooms on top, I’m gonna think, “I hope that’s chocolate.”
I think my experience can be generalized to the population as a whole, with some minor variation for specific flavor of cake,
I wondered about that too. Here’s the company’s web site. The banner says “HANDS ON ORIGINALS christian outfitters” and in big font, “High Quality, Customized Christian Apparel”.
But their actual products seem to be generic apparel with custom (customer specified) print. So I have no idea what makes their apparel Christian. Looks more like a generic T-shirt company owned by evangelical Christians.
I am NOT religious myself, but I agree with this verdict.
If something goes against a company’s ethics or religion, they shouldnt have to perform a service they dont want to
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I’m not so sure I’m seeing the distinction. Did you look at the T-Shirt in question? It’s a lot less innocuous, in its “gayness”, than a wedding cake with two men on it. It says “Pride”, but it’s not festooned in rainbows and same sex couples (it does have a spectrum/rainbow of what looks like colored marbles, but that’s pretty stylized.)
I’m not so sure I’m seeing how this is different from decorating a cake with “Steve loves Andrew” on it. The T-Shirt “endorses” a Gay Pride Parade, and the cake “endorses” a SSM. If it were an issue of whether a company would sell something to a gay couple (that is, “we don’t serve gays here”), when it’s just a standard, off-the-shelf item gets much more dicey. But when you have to customize something, I think the line is much harder to draw.
I agree that it’s a fine line, but there has to be a line somewhere. The question is, when does protecting a class from bigotry trump the free speech rights of the business owner? I think the answer should be that protection is paramount if a class is prevented from just living their lives - from celebrating their wedding in the same way as anyone else, for example. The essential purpose of the cake was to celebrate the wedding of two specific people, not to make a general political statement about all same-sex weddings. But when we’re talking about materials that explicitly support general social or political views, then I think the free speech rights of the business owner trump the protection. I think the (very fine) line should be: if you ask the cake-maker to write “Steve loves Andrew” when he would routinely write “Steve loves Jane” then he must do so; if you ask him to write “SSM is awesome” then he should be free to decline.
It’s nothing new. A while back I wanted an anti-Bush sticker printed, and the company I regularly used for such work refused on a Xian/patriot basis.
It didn’t occur to me to sue them. I just found another printer with a sense of humor. I agree that pushing instances like this does the overall gay rights issue no good.
It’s nice to see consensus here. The distinction is that they aren’t refusing service to gay people. They would make a different shirt for gay people and they wouldn’t make that same tshirt for a straight person.
