What, in your view as a poster then, is the substantive difference between IMHO and GD?
My mistake. Seems I myself wound up believing one of the rumors instead of getting the facts. I definitely remember people claiming that they deliberately singled this guy out, and I guess I got that lumped into the group of things I knew for sure instead of things to check.
Tangentially relevant to this, but the Oregon Court of Appeals just upheld a fine against the bakery “Sweet Cakes by Melissa” after they refused to make a wedding cake for a lesbian couple:
SCOTUS rules 7-2 for the baker in Masterpiece Cakeshop. Ruling is that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission was not neutral with respect to religion in this particular case. This narrow ruling does not foretell how cases raising similar constitutional claims might be decided.
From the intro in the SCOTUS decision (pdf link):
OK, please correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that Kennedy’s decision boils down to “it sure seems like those commissioners were mean” and “this is what the commissioners were thinking, and it’s wrong”.
Still reading the opinion, but the Commission’s hostility (Kagan’s word) to religion was apparently the key issue.
To a point. Kennedy is saying that the Commissioners comments showed that the hearing was tainted by bias and the baker is entitled to an impartial hearing.
It’s more a case of “this is what the commissioners said, and it doesn’t sound like they afforded the baker due process based on those comments.”
As I said in the prediction thread:
And so a Christian baker is rescued from almost certain persecution. :rolleyes:
Nina Totenberg says the decision was very narrow and based on the justices thinking th baker had not been afforded due process due to the court’s antipathy towards religion. Justice Kennedy made a point of saying that a similar question with different details might be ruled a different way.
Not to mention rescued from being forced to leave his wife & kids and become gay.
Seriously, AP Radio News just had a statement from the guy; he’s all, “Baking this would ruin my relationships with my wife and my kids but most of all my relationship with God!”
Don’t care about his personal life. Here’s money, give cake.
I think that a gay wedding is a “thing” now is a far more important fact than the commercial implications thereof. In my own living memory, there was a time when it wasn’t legal to marry someone of a different “race”. (Square quotes to imply “whatever the fuck that means”.)
Right, but that is a court’s duty. Decide the issue on non-Constitutional grounds if they can. (not that they always follow that “rule.”)
“Due process” is a constitutional issue.
The Court dodged the ultimate constitutional question, but I think one aspect of the arguments on that issue is misunderstood. The baker argued that compelling him to provide a custom wedding cake would violate his free-speech rights. He claimed he was unwilling to create a custom cake for a same-sex wedding because of his religious views. So, this case is often framed as a religious rights vs. gay rights issue.
It seems to me that, to the free-speech argument, it is relevant that he denied service to the same-sex couple because they were seeking a cake for a gay wedding reception. I don’t see how the fact that his religious beliefs underlay that is relevant. IOW, if the baker was opposed to same-sex marriage for reasons other than religion, I don’t think it would change the case.
And now a Yahoo article is claiming that SCOTUS voted “narrowly.”
7-2 is not “narrowly.”
Narrow in the context of legal decisions refers to how broad or narrow the holding is. In this case, the holding is narrow.
The “narrowly” is a reference to the nature of the decision, NOT the numerical balance of the court.
Edit: Ninja’ed by Richard Parker.
They ruled narrowly. They didn’t vote narrowly.