This is not the same as other discrimination cases. In other cases, the state is demanding that property be used as it says. In this case, the state is demanding that a person’s body be used as it says.
Sex-workers, masseuses, actors, models, artists, craftsmen, all make a living with their bodies. Their product is directly tied to their bodies.
Hotel owners, lunch counter owners, gas station attendants, landlords, dry cleaners, not so much.
If you know anything about human psychology you know there is a difference at a very basic level.
Except the state isn’t demanding them to do something ‘they don’t ordinarily do in the course of running thier business’ - there is nothing inherently different about baking/decorating a cake for bob/jane and bob/jim.
What - the “Does WillFarnaby like it” test? Is that the metric we’re using now?
I note you haven’t actually addressed any of my points, so I’ll take that as a concession. But to recap: the fact that it’s “cake” is irrelevant.
Proportionately. It’s rather telling that the only punishments you seem to be able to envision are extreme ones involving torture and death. Why is that, Will? There are other options - fines and other civil compensatory judgments, or perhaps at most removal of the ability to carry out a business in which one is unwilling to serve all customers equally. None of which involve holding a gun to anyone’s head.
And the bigot can remain a bigot all he (or she) likes. He can think nasty thoughts about gays and blacks and Jews; he can even say them out loud. But if he wants to operate a public business, the conditions of doing so require him to conform to all the relevant legal requirements, including health and safety, public hygiene, avoiding false advertising, and not discriminating against members of protected classes.
What if my body wants to run around naked in public? What if my body doesn’t want to pay taxes? What if my body wants to drive through red lights? What if my body meets another body coming through the rye?
The last one aside, the government doesn’t need to “commandeer my body” to compel compliance with the rules. The government are the representatives of the society in which I live, and the requirement for enjoying the benefits of that society is conformity to a minimum standard of behavior. Laws are not always fair and just, nor are they always fairly and justly applied, but you appear to object to the whole concept of laws. If you don’t like the rules, go live in the wilderness but stop pretending that your worldview makes any sense for any collective group of people numbering above about 20.
I agree that there’s a clear psychological distinction between sex work and pumping gas. But whereas making a sandwich (lunch counter owner) is in the same category as pumping gas, you claim that baking a cake is similar to sex work? That’s ridiculous.
I agree that an exemption to anti-discrimination laws should be carved out for sex work for the reasons you suggest; perhaps it should extend to any work that involves physical contact with a customer. I’m not sure exactly where that line should be drawn (a masseur seems like a marginal case), but I’m damn sure it doesn’t include baking cakes.
There should also be an exemption for creative art, but I think it must be narrowly defined, otherwise it’s a gaping loophole where every bigot can claim that what they do is “creative art”. If you’re an artist, of course you can choose to just work in your studio, and paint whatever you want and display and sell it, with no obligation to paint anything in particular; it would be preposterous to suggest otherwise. But if you choose to run a business where you specifically advertise to the public that you (say) take commissions to paint portraits, I don’t think you should be allowed to evade anti-discrimination law. I don’t think you should be allowed to refuse a commission to paint a portrait of a black person when you would accept a commission to paint a similar portrait of a white person.
As for the baker? I don’t think baking personalized cakes is remotely close to either category of exemption. The closest analogy is a jeweler selling watches and offering an inscription service. The jeweler can’t refuse to inscribe (say) “Ted & Steve, eternal love” on a watch if he would inscribue “Ted & Tina, eternal love”.
I thought the one y’all were so upset over was Mitch McConnell, not Orrin Hatch, but it doesn’t matter all that much. The GOP in the Senate gambled that they could get a better Justice than Garland. It worked out that way. Hatch went along with the gamble. If you are saying that whatever Hatch said should be inexorably binding on the Senate, well, it doesn’t work that way. Hatch isn’t “the Senate”; he isn’t even the Majority Leader of the Senate.
It ran like I said it did. Obama, perhaps in part because of what Hatch said, thought he could get Garland past the Senate. The GOP in the Senate thought the next nominee would be better, or at least the same. So they rolled the dice, and sure enough we got Gorsuch, and pretty soon Kavanaugh. Sometimes a long shot pays off.
This kind of “no backsies - the Senate has to confirm whoever Hatch accepts” doesn’t fly.
I don’t know what you mean - I hear conservatives bitching about activist judges all the time. That’s why I very much prefer Gorsuch (and Kavanaugh) over Garland (or Ginsberg et al.). They are textualists, not activists.
I hear liberals complaining about activist judges too, but that’s mostly projection.
I was saying what I said. Perhaps you’d like to go back and re-read it.
You characterized this as Obama trying to “slide” a “liberal” candidate “past the Senate”, which is a unique way of paraphrasing “Obama openly nominated the lifelong conservative judge a leading Republican member of the Senate said he should.”
Good thing that’s not what I said. Again - for more information, please re-read.
The argument that “craftsmen” are all doing ‘body work’ is so tortured that it robs your made-up concept of ‘body work’ of all meaning. I’m a computer programmer. I use my fingers to type, and my fingers are part of my body - therefore computer programming is basically sex work by your argument. Which is absurd.
But I’ll tell you what - I’ll meet you halfway, and say that I’m willing to apply the same rules that I want to apply to cake bakers to sex work too. Specifically, nobody has to bake a cake or have sex with anybody they don’t like. But if they don’t, and the spurned customer is of a protected class and can make a reasonable argument that they were denied business because of their protected class, then the worker can get their ass sued and be forced out of business.
Cake baker and sex worker alike.
My goal in this isn’t actually to force bigots to treat people fairly, after all. It’s to force businessmen to treat people fairly. You want to refuse to make cakes for gay people? Do it from the privacy of your home.
Um, you’d force a sex worker to have sex with someone they didn’t want to? Let’s say you don’t want to have sex with women. Gender is a so-called protected class. You could force a prostitute to have sex with a gender they refuse to? :dubious:
Yeah, I’m also a bit bemused by your position here begbert. I think WillFarnaby’s claim that baking a cake is equivalent to sex work is ridiculous. I don’t see why you would choose to concede that claim, and come thereby to what seems like an indefensible position with regard to sex work.
I very explicitly said that WillFarnaby’s equation of sex work and cake baking is moronic, and I very explicitly said that I don’t want to force people to have sex with anybody they don’t want to.
‘But you said you’ll take away their sex license after they’re successfully sued under anti-discrimination laws!!’
Yes, I did. Because guess what? Black people are customers too. Once we achieve that halcyon state where sex work is a legitimate, regulated business, I think that a black person should be able to go up to a brothel and buy exactly the same sex services as a white person.
‘But does that mean that every prostitute has to be willing to engage in gay sex?’
Brace yourself: nope. Because gay sex is a specific service. Just like blowjobs and penetration aren’t the same, and you can’t be forced to go to the mattress just because you give out blowjobs. But if you do engage in gay sex, you can’t say you only have gay sex with white people, or straight people, or whichever. Because you’re part of a business, and if you can’t do your job equally for all, then you should quit and open a slot for somebody who will.
‘But gay cakes are a different product than straight cakes!’
Not that I can see. They look the same to me.
This just feels wrong to me. I think sex work should be exempt from anti-discrimination laws at an individual worker level, because the “product” being offered overlaps with rights of bodily autonomy. It really does seem fundamentally different from baking a cake.
I agree that an organized brothel should not be permitted to turn away customers in a protected class at a business level. So perhaps any organized brothel must seek to accommodate customers by recruiting a diversity of workers as necessary, so that the business is not discriminating against a protected class. But I think an individual sex worker should be permitted to decline sex with a particular individual for any reason at all, including declining to perform sex acts with people of certain races, sexual orientations, ages.
I can see your argument that if a sex worker wants to discriminate, they should get out of the business altogether to preserve their desired level of autonomy. And I’m not sure there’s any clear-cut ethical objection to that. But consider, for example, that a worker may have had a bad experience (rape or other violation of consent) with somebody with certain characteristics, so that sex with someone superficially similar is genuinely traumatic, even if there is no rational basis for it. That seems fundamentally different from saying “a black guy once mugged me, so I won’t serve any black people at my bakery”. It just feels fundamentally wrong to me that anyone should ever have to justify their right to bodily autonomy in any context.
I can see the argument but I’m not convinced that carving out a special exception allowing discrimination in business on the basis of ‘body autonomy’ is the best approach. My position comes from the basis that special exceptions are to be avoided, that slippery slope arguments can and do exist (‘baking a cake uses my body’ is absurd, but ‘digging ditches uses my body’ is slightly less so…maybe? Arguably? Confusingly), and of course there is a simple remedy to the problem that doesn’t require the exception: get out of businesses where your predilections interfere with even handling of your customers.
It might be worth mentioning that the outcome where an individual is forced out of the workplace due to their discriminatory inclinations would only come to pass if the business was successfully sued for it. A business could in theory make efforts to ‘shelter’ people with discriminatory inclinations, routing business to employees willing to conduct it and thus preventing customers from realizing that not all the employees of the business are willing to serve them.
Bakeries could do this too, of course, had they a diverse enough set of employees and if their management didn’t share the employee’s unwillingness to deal with all protected classes.