Without reading the entire thread, it seems entirely reasonable to me that a baker should be able to refuse to bake a certain design or text on their cake (whether “Trump sucks” or “Trump is great” or “happy gay marriage!” or “happy Christian marriage”), for any reason whatsoever, but shouldn’t be able to refuse to serve any customers based on their race, sexual identity/orientation, religion, etc. So a baker should be able to say “I won’t write “happy gay marriage” on your cake”, but they still have to serve a gay customer, including make an (unmarked) wedding cake for them.
My understanding is that there are bakeries that have “standard” wedding cakes, and then places like Charm City Cakes, featured on Food Network’s “Ace of Cakes,” show, who say:
If you’ve never watched similar shows, they create customized, one-of-a-kind cakes that involve artistic imagery writ in fondant and icing. If you want to have a Girl With the Dragon Tattoo themed wedding, you engage a cake artist and they create something like this.
Do you understand the difference? It’s not simply choosing design 5C on page 12. It’s creating an artistic theme from scratch, never seen before and not used again.
Like this case where another Colorado bakery refused to produce Bible shaped cakes with anti-gay Bible verses and/or designs. And the state Civil Rights division of the Department of Regulatory Agencies investigated but refused to take action against the baker.
Sounds like a 14th Amendment unequal protection argument to throw into the mix.
Yes. This seems quite reasonable to me. “Sell me that cake you’re offering to sell anyone else,” is a reasonable request. “Create one-of-a-kind art that advances my position you disagree with,” is not.
I’m not seeing how that applies to the Westboro case, unless the baker would agree to produce an anti-Quran cake for people other than Westboro. Assuming the secular cakist refuses to produce a cake for a Christian explicitly because (s)he is Christian, then I agree that person falls afoul of Colorado law too. Do the plaintiffs have such an example?
Bit late, but for the record I am an unashamed liberal, with slight fiscal conservative tendencies that I tend to repress unless the GOP hasn’t done anything particularly stupid lately. But I haven’t read Alinsky, so they won’t give me a copy of the Liberal Agenda.
Thank you. The reason why I support the kind of anti-discrimination accomodation laws that originate (I think) from the Civil Rights act is because, otherwise, I fear that sundown towns or their equivalent will once again become prominent, not because I think such discrimination is wrong or distasteful. I think these protections are necessary because without them, towns might pop up in which a gay person simply can’t get a meal, or a bed, etc., because a majority of the town’s inhabitants are bigoted.
But having control over what they write on their cakes doesn’t have anything to do with the possibility of an equivalent to sundown towns.
Contrary to right wing radio or other popular understanding, as a liberal/progressive I really do want to (in general) maximize freedom in day-to-day life, both for business owners and customers, as long as they aren’t infringing on the rights of others. I think allowing bakers to choose what messages to right on their cakes, but not what customers they can turn away (at least not based on race, religion, sexual orientation, etc.), threads this needle in this case.
But the baker isn’t unwilling to sell to the gay couple because they are gay. He’s unwilling to produce a custom wedding cake. In other words, his refusal is to create a custom message in cake form for the customer. He’s not refusing to serve the customer at all; he’s refusing to create a custom cake.
Similarly, the secular cake artist refused to create a custom message using Bible verse because he disagreed with the message.
At what point does the cake become “custom”? If the bakers regularly sell cakes with “Live Happily Ever After, Ann and Mike”, is it a “custom message” if it says “Andy and Mike” instead? I can understand “we don’t stock figurines that are same sex pairs”, but just the names? Just curious where you think the line and and should be drawn.
The line is drawn where the creativity to create the message comes from the baker, not the customer. If the customer says, “I want one of your ‘Live Happily’ cakes, with ‘Andy’ and ‘Mike,’ as the names,” the baker should be required to sell.
If the customer says, “I met Andy at the marina and our first date was renting a sailboat, so could we get a cake with a nautical theme of some kind?” then, no.
To a limited extent the courts have ruled that certain behaviours are so intrinsically linked to a protected class that discrimination against the behaviour is discrimination against the protected class. Homosexuality is the prime example of this. So a B&B cannot just say we don’t discriminate against homosexuals, just against men who have sex with other men.
So Westboro could argue that being anti-Quranic is so intrinsically tied up in what it means to be an adherent of their particular religious ideology that to discriminate against those who are anti-Quarinc is inherently to discriminate against persons who are their religious members.
Not sure if it would fly as an argument, but that is route I would expect them to take.
Right-wingers understand the thought process of liberals too well. “Businesses can’t refuse to service A because A is statistically more likely to be correlated with people from “protected group”.”
Say a cake decorator refuses to make a cake in the shape of intertwined penises. The liberal/progressive would say " Gays are statistically more likely to request an intertwined penis cake, so you are discriminating against gays."
If the baker would sell the exact same cake to a straight couple, then it is not a refusal to create a custom message. And thus far I have seen nothing to indicate that this cake was any different from what anyone else could order.
You have successfully slayed those liberals made of straw. If you’d like to know how real-world liberals feel (most of us, anyway), I’m sure many of us in this thread would be happy to help.
As Really Not All That Bright has already noted, your assertion rests on a rather stunning ignorance of the way that religious beliefs were used, in the history of the United States, to justify and sustain racial and ethnic discrimination.
So, if Andy draws up his own nautical themed design and tells the baker, “do this”, then the baker would have to comply? Assuming there was nothing in the design that the baker would not do for anyone (i.e., if the baker was asked to show the couple having sex or something like that).
