Is America the only modern country with a Christian problem when it comes to baked goods? How do other societies handle the conflict between free practice of religion and anti-discrimination?
Of course the U.S. isn’t the only country where that can happen. It is literally illegal to be gay at all in many countries even today. Forget wedding cakes, they can even be executed for it in some places. The U.S. is gay friendly compared to most of the world.
They’re not very modern then, are they?
You are getting into circular definitions. There are no possible answers if you do that. Russia is “modern” by any reasonable definition of the word but very homophobic in general. The concept of gay wedding cakes wouldn’t even make sense to to most of them.
Spain had one case where a restaurant (“very politely” according to the grooms themselves) refused to accept a reservation for a gay wedding. They got the appropriate fine and changed the policy which had led to that denial.
In general, “public establishments” can refuse to serve people who are behaving inappropriately, but being gay isn’t inappropriate behavior.
The core issue in the “gay cake” dispute is discrimination vs. artistic expression (AKA freedom of speech).
If you go to a hotel or restaurant, they cannot refuse to server you because you are gay, black, female, old, foreign or any other group protected from discrimination by the laws of the land. This applies to most western countries to a fairly strong degree.
OTOH, you cannot ask an artist to for example paint (or write or sculpt or whatever) something he/she disagrees with.
So the question is - to what extent is say, a cake decorating “artist” an artist vs. a businessman. Would a Gordon Ramsay-level chef consider himself an artist and refuse to do your meal in his restaurant because you’re black or gay? How about the lady that paints your nails? Is that “art”, or just a commodity business?
In the current case, the fellow who designed wedding cakes (he claimed, seems to be true) only does specialized, one-of-a-kind wedding cakes personally designed for each customer. Perhaps “artist” applies. For cookies and other pastries, made by the tray-full, not so. If he had a display case full of ready-to-go cakes, probably would have lost. If all he had to do was write something on the cake (or sell a second plastic groom figurine made in China) it very likely would NOT qualify as “art”.
The difference is that America seems to be somewhat unique in the western world in the level to which more fundamentalist religion dictates public policy. (Especially since the recent referendum in Ireland). In most other countries, tolerance for gay rights, gay marriage, etc. seem to be pretty open in the last 30 years or so. In public politics, for example, Canadian political figures rarely have to declare any religious affiliation or conviction. French Catholic (allegedly) Quebec was the first province (in the late 70’s) to give up prosecuting Dr. Morgentaler, who ran an abortion clinic as an act of civil disobedience; the abortion law in Canada has been a non-issue for 30 years. Perhaps as a result, fundamentalist Christian attitudes are not given the level of deference they receive in the USA. (Should also note that very few countries have a “free speech” right as fundamentally powerful as the USA)
The same attitude applies in most other western countries. As one post points out, there are many third world countries and some second-world ones with much more hostile attitudes to minorities, especially gays.
In Spain, comissioned art is the intellectual property of whomever comissioned it, so even if you call the cake “art” it’s still the intelectual property of its buyers. But we don’t call cakes art anyway; a baker is a business person, no matter how pretty or tasty the product happens to be.
That’s at least as big a difference with the US as the fundamentalism thing. Two differences which are about as big, actually.
However true that may be in other contexts, the cake case turns upon the opposite point. The baker prevailed because the Supreme Court found that Colorado’s public policy as applied to him was uniquely hostile to devout Christians.
American law is unique in protecting religious expression from infringement by public policy, to be sure. Laws like the prohibitions France and Denmark have imposed upon Islamic women’s clothing or the contemplated bans on male circumcision in Germany and Iceland would likely be difficult to enact here.
Note too that Canada is unique in having no legal restrictions on abortion. Most of western Europe has tighter legal restrictions than those in the US (waiting periods, physician approval, shorter late-term availability).
Surely you don’t mean that an artist can be legally compelled to accept a commission against his wishes, though, do you?
And I would be surprised to hear that Spanish law affirmatively defines artistic expression according to the medium used. I suspect rather that like most places, it simply has not had occasion to define the line between artistic expression and commerce. Even the US Supreme Court continued to duck that question in today’s decision, after all.
This is incorrect, wrt gays. In many states and at the federal level, gays are not a suspect class (or protected class). They are in some states, but not all. And there are different levels of protections in states that do offer protection.
I didn’t know a cake could be gay. 
Here is a list of countries that recognize same sex marriage. I assume cake is served at the festivities.
It’s odd that a country where religion is expressly excluded from government has more problems with religious factions than do other Western governments which fully incorporate religion in government.* “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”*
The CHARTER OF FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS OF THE EUROPEAN UNION declares that - "Any discrimination based on any ground such as sex, race, colour, ethnic or social origin, genetic features, language, religion or belief, political or any other opinion, membership of a national minority, property, birth, disability, age or sexual orientation shall be prohibited."
In France, with extremely limited exceptions (abnormally small or abnormally large sales, intent to harass, identical goods prepackaged together and parts of a set, I think that’s about it), you can’t refuse to sell anything you’re offering for sale to anybody for any reason if you have a trade license (that is, if you’re a business owner). So, the issue is moot here : your religious beliefs and your customer’s sexual preferences are irrelevant. If you own a shop, you’re obligated to sell whatever you’re offering to anybody willing to pay for it.
Too late to edit : after reading the previous replies, I assume that a French baker could argue in court that he’s acting as an artist rather than as a baker/shop owner when making a “gay marriage cake”. I still can’t see him convincing the judges.
I don’t recall a wedding cake case in Canada. We did have a printer years ago who refused to print some flyers for a gay-rights activity. The courts in that case held that he had a limited power to refuse to print, based on the specific wording of the flyers. Note that was a lot closer to freedom of the press kind of issues than freedom of icing. 
It’s all a question of whose rights are considered a problem. Again, for instance, US law has no general problem with Islamic women’s clothing.
I thought all cakes were gay :eek:
I think the art angle is interesting, and whilst I think it’s really stupid and pointless for a baker to refuse to make a cake for a gay wedding, I don’t feel like it can be absolutely declared that the decorating of cakes is not (or cannot be) ‘art’ - and I do believe an artist (even a commercial artist) should be free to select or decline commissions based on preferences, even if those preferences demonstrate a pattern over time.
I’m a bit of a fan of Antony Gormley - much of his work consists of sculptures, very predominantly of male figures (often based on life casts or measurements of himself). I don’t think he’s made very many female forms.
He accepts commissions - should he be allowed to decline a commission to produce a sculpture of a female form? It’s very easy to argue that such a refusal would be sexist, but coercing him to do it doesn’t seem right either.
It’s a tricky one.
Something I learned when I had a brief spell working in a restaurant kitchen was to never annoy the person who is cooking your food. I would be pretty wary of a cake that had been reluctantly produced by a baker who objected to my request. I would certainly not want to pay an artist to produce a work of art that he did not want to make.
The point was that this was not a bake shop where you walk in and grab your wedding cake off the shelf, have the names iced onto it. There’s an emerging tradition in the USA that sometimes wedding cakes (or cakes for many fancy occasions) can be custom-made works of art when the buyer has excessive money to blow. The baker said the couple could buy any of his off-the-shelf products (none of them wedding cakes) but he would not design/make one specifically for their occasion. So in this situation, the “artist” argument makes sense. If it had simply been standard off-the-shelf cake, or if that was one of the options in his shop, he probably wouldn’t have even gotten to the Supreme Court.
Counter to that - a high-end baker that gets a reputation in moneyed social circles that his product is crap (would the guests know why?) is more likely to hurt himself.
I suppose the problem in the USA with religion is that it got its start as a place where the most fanatically dissident sects of Europe went to escape government controls.
As someone said when discussing this - where does it stop? Some people who paint fingernails do “artistic expression”. IMHO - I am not a Supreme Court judge - there’s a sliding scale from commodity to art and at one end, you can pick and choose your customers, at the other end, you must serve whoever walks in. Presumably one factor is the time and effort put into each piece.
But then, the onus would be on the businessman to prove he was more of an artist than a commodity purveyor.
It’s not like it happens all that often in the US, and Norway, having a fraction of the population, and a lower percentage of all kinds of religiousness hasn’t had the specific issue. But in general, although there are some exemptions from anti-discrimination laws on religious grounds (for instance churches can refuse to hire clergy who break the tenets of the faith), you can’t claim “religious freedom” to avoid doing something that can reasonably be considered part of your job.
So what we have had in Norway for the last year and a half are occasional discussion about whether or not the clergy of the Norwegian Lutheran Church (formerly, and still in most senses, the national church) can refuse to marry same sex couples.
The church leadership approved changes in practice to allow same sex marriages in the church, but the odd parish and minister are refusing, some going as far as to resign from their positions in protest. Other’s stay on, but claim a right to refuse. As far as I can tell this still hasn’t become a court issue. In general people get married in a neighbouring parish, or the service is done by a guest minister, rather than make their happy day front page news for months and months.