Yes. Baking cakes that celebrate gay marriage goes against the bakers conscience.
When you depart from well established prior practice, OF COURSE the other side has cause to complain.
By your rationale, the next Democratic president with a Democratic senate could pack the court with 10 MORE liberal justices because there is no constitution prohibition against it and the Republicans would have no right to complain. And this time the Democratic senators might go along with it.
And I agree that nobody should be forcing him to bake cakes for people he doesn’t like. No baker should be chained to a counter and forced to bake.
Fortunately they have an alternative - they can stop baking cakes for money, and find a career which doesn’t temp them to break the law. I also promote this type of solution for people who are generally good workers but if set to manning a register can’t resist dipping into the till.
No of course not. Race is a federally protected class. Sexual orientation is not.
Your mileage on that statement may vary by region - there are more protections than federal, and more localized protections still count.
The law doesn’t usually consider a person’s occupation a “choice” in the same way that you mean here. How a person earns their livelihood is not some frilovous caprice. Telling them they either “do it in a way that violates their conscience or they don’t do it at all” is unconstitutional unless the thing we are telling them to do is itself more important than the guarantees of freedom of conscience.
I don’t know how food safety standards could violate a person’s conscience but I suspect that a law that prevented mass food poisoning would pass this test and a law that said that all food must include bacon would not.
Could we similarly force doctors to perform elective abortions if they perform dilation and extractions for miscarriages?
Not if they run afoul of constitutional rights. Then they hardly count at all.
No. We can, however, expect them to perform D&Cs for lesbians if they do so for straight women.
Are you suggesting that making protected classes at the state level is unconstitutional?
Since when? I’ve literally never heard this.
Thanks for finally coming around.
Public accommodations laws.
Please clarify what you mean.
Allowed? Allowed by whom?
Not if you claim that your god hates that protected class, apparently.
In this vision of yours, who does the “allowing?”
I don’t see how that would violate anyone’s religious beliefs. Lets assume that the procedure for a D&C is exactly the same as an abortion, why would the doctor be able to object to the abortion?
No I’m saying that state restrictions are meaningless in the face of constitutional rights.
The primacy of gay rights over religious freedom has yet to be established. SCOTUS may or may not elevate LGBTQ to a protected class (I suspect that they will do in my lifetime). But for right now, Colorado’s antipathy to religious rights makes this a bad place to try to bring these cases.