The closest nationally legal profession I can think of to prostitution would be a physical therapist. In physical therapy, there are occasions when you are touched in rather intimate areas.
Well, I just thought of another, a nurse. Nurses need to get really intimate with their patients from time to time, what with changing catheters or sponge-baths and such.
In either of those professions, would they be allowed to discriminate against someone due to their race, religion, gender identity or sexual orientation?
Paid sex work would be an odd one. I would be inclined to say that a business should take all comers, buy that individuals do not. For instance there are very few dogs (only if they are hostile) that I turn away, but I do have groomers that refuse to do particular dogs. As long as someone is willing to do them, then there is no problem.
So, in the end I’d say that it falls on the business owner. The owner of the business needs to ensure that there is no one turned away due to discrimination based on protected class. If that means that the business owner themselves will occasionally need to perform services for clients that their employees refuse, then that may be the way it works out.
Keep in mind that poor hygiene, poor attitude, or even just being really ugly are not protected classes.
In fact a business could probably get away with turning away anyone - so long as they managed to do so without revealing that their motivations were bigoted. Or at least retaining enough plausible deniability to avoid losing in court.
What do I think of all this nonsense? I think people should try to get along.
You’re gay and the baker hates gays? Go to another baker. Even if you drive an extra 10 miles, that won’t be a catastrophe. Or just tell him you want a pink cake with blue icing. He doesn’t need to ask why. Or bake your own cake. I think even I baked a cake by myself once.
You’re a gay-hating baker and a gay asks for a cake? Pray to the God you pretend to believe in, or consult s pastor. Maybe God will help you be a more loving person. Or deal with the customer frankly: “I’ll bake you a cake if you insist, but my heart won’t be in it.”
But, oh no! Not in post-rational America. Let’s turn everything into a court case and let the lawyers and jury debate some picayune details. Submitting deep questions to the Wise Men might be good … if we had any Wise Men. Instead we have a Supreme Court with several Justices chosen explicitly for their misogyny and hatreds. What does a legalistic ruling from such a Court mean anyway, in any deep moral sense?
Why not wait for a decade or two before finalizing society’s views on such pressing matters as custom cakes? Let America first decide whether it wants to lurch further to the right, or back towards the center.
IIRC the couple did not request any message or cake topper. They just wanted a cake and were denied because the baker objected to the occasion it would be used for.
There is a possibility that you believe that, but we would not read such a twisted interpretation of the use of such a well known and well heeled quote.
However, we would be in favor of changing a law that caused people to starve to death, are we to believe that you favor changing the law to cause starvation?
The point of that quote is to show that even if laws are in theory applied evenly, the real world application creates and increases inequality.
To some of us, addressing those inequalities, even to the point of changing laws in order to prevent fellow humans from suffering due to the selfish actions of others is something that we favor. To others, fellow humans suffering due to the selfish actions of others is the favored outcome. There is no objective measure as to which side is “better”, but I know my opinion on which I prefer to be a member of, YMMV.
Or, you know, just reminding you that you are not the end all be all, and that other people have just as much a right to exist as you. The only thing being sold is something that you are used to taking without paying for.
My mileage does vary. I prefer freedom and individuality, instead of a society in which you, or others of your ilk, get to judge things like “selfish,” and “fellow humans suffering.”
If I am a baker, you should patronize me if you wish to, and avoid my goods if you wish to. I should be free to sell what goods I wish, and not sell the goods I don’t wish to sell, and my business should prosper or suffer by the public’s buying reactions to those choices.
But you don’t agree. That’s fine – that’s why we have a system in place to decide what rules are best.
In this case, I believe that one of our pre-existing rules settles the issue: we cannot compel speech. But perhaps that rule won’t be seen to apply here. We’ll see. Ultimately, I am content to see this resolved by the very systems we have already set in place. If it goes against my preferred outcome, well, that’s the price I pay for living in a society in which I am not king.
We already know this leads to widespread discrimination. We’ve seen it. In the south, even if you were a merchant who was happy to sell to black people, you would be shunned by white people if you did. Suppliers might not sell to you and so on.
This “free market solves all” notion has never worked unless you consider a society with rampant discrimination to be working well.
This is more or less my thoughts as well, to some degree. I side, of course, with the LGBTQ community more so than the baker; however, it does feel sometimes like they’re going looking for a fight and are shocked to discover that they get one.
I have a funny feeling I could walk into almost any bakery and say “I’d like a cake with a blue interior and a pink exterior” and the reply I would get is “Sure, when do you need it?” But no, you have to go into a bakery, knowing the guy is opposed to homosexuality, and ask for a cake for your transgender coming out is picking a fight.
But the baker is wrong, and he should bake the cake and then pray for the souls of his customers if he wants.
I think framing it as “picking a fight” or characterizing this as zealots persecuting one baker is mistaken. Rosa Parks was not trying to persecute one unfortunate bus driver. The continuing process here is to set up a test case to clarify the law, since the Supreme Court evaded the issue last time.
This was not the first disputed cake order. I think the pink/blue cake was an attempt to demonstrate that the baker would not make a cake for this stated purpose, when he would produce a precisely physical identical cake for another stated purpose. And in my opinion, it’s the wrong test, it’s too weak. I think a stronger and better standard is whether he’d produce a customized cake where there is a physical difference, but the difference is clearly solely attributable to membership in a protected class - say, a personalized wedding cake decorated with two male figurines (when he’s willing to produce one with bridge & groom figurines).
Sure - there’s that excluded middle of being shunned as perverts who don’t deserve the same social standing and human rights as upstanding white cis-het Christians. And grateful that you aren’t actually dead. Except when you are dead, of course.
Have you noticed what this thread is about? And that the significance of the Anatole France quotation was the underlying principle, rather than a literal suggestion that anyone was about to die of starvation for lack of cake?
