Should a janitor should be able to refuse to clean a site before a same-sex wedding is held there? I’m sure God would appreciate the spite.
No, it truly does not; religions that advocate human or animal sacrifice, to use an extreme example.
No, it does not.
Not swearing to God, clearly. Is this a whoosh? No one’s advocating forcing the baker into homosexuality.
Who decides that?
No, but the baker would be forced to assist something he does not religiously support - a homosexual wedding.
And if his religion opposed cakes for interracial marriages, black people or women would it be OK for him to refuse them too?
No one forced him to open a place of public accommodation.
If your religious convictions prohibit you from operating a commercial service or place of public accommodation with equal access to your facilities and services for all clients, then you should honor your religious convictions by finding another line of work.
Same goes not just for bakers opposed to gay marriage but also for pharmacists who think birth control is a sin and vegetarian supermarket checkout clerks who believe eating meat is immoral and teetotaling taxi drivers who don’t want to transport luggage containing liquor.
If you have a job or a business that involves providing legal goods or services to the general public, you are not ethically entitled to deny certain services to certain members of the public because your religion forbids it.
And if you insist that you are entitled to do so, then you can’t complain if people who disagree with your imposing your religious discrimination on your customers consider themselves entitled to boycott your business.
If people keep their religious convictions in their private life, they have a right to expect that they shouldn’t be discriminated against in the workplace because of them. But if they insist on obtruding their religious convictions into the workplace via selective refusals to do their job, then they’re the ones doing the discriminating.
Where this analogy fails is that drunk people driving cars objectively increase risks for themselves and other people. This is about what actually happens. Whereas same-sex marriage objectively does not increase risks for themselves and other people. So yes, although I object to car-driving when done by drunks, that’s not the same thing as objecting to marriage when done by gays. The latter is discriminatory.
If drunks were a protected class, you’d have a point. You don’t.
Of course you don’t think that. You don’t even think a person’s right to follow his own religious beliefs trumps paying taxes–or do you think that Quakers should be able to decrease their tax burden by the amount of the US military spending?
Trumps all my foot. You likely just think that discrimination against traditionally persecuted minorities is not a big enough issue that we should have laws against it.
Bullshit. Quakers are forced to assist something they do not religiously support, i.e., warfare, but the baker is forced to do no such thing. A bigot baker always has the choice not to open a public accommodation.
Do you believe the same should apply to a cake-maker who has sincere religious beliefs against interracial marriages or Jewish marriages?
There’s also the little matter of legality. We as a society, via our elected representatives and the courts that condone their actions, have decreed that combining drinking with operating a motor vehicle is unacceptable.
It’s not a question of whether we’d personally tolerate it “even if there were no law against it”; we as a society have decided that we won’t tolerate it, and hence there is a law against it.
But that is question begging. The laws (in those states/localities) prohibit discrimination based upon the sexual orientation of the customer, not upon anything which may be related to sexual orientation.
If the baker refuses service to gay people, then that is a violation of the law. It does not follow that the baker must bake cakes for all homosexual related activity imaginable.
If a heterosexual man tries to buy a cake for his homosexual brother’s SSM, is the customer being discriminated against based upon sexual orientation? Of course not.
So if a baker says that he is not prejudiced against a particular minority, but he simply doesn’t believe that such minorities should be allowed to eat the cakes he makes, are you saying that’s okay?
As in: “I will happily employ Zoroastrians. However, I have a religious objection to Zoroastrians eating sweets. Therefore, I will not sell cakes for Zoroastrian consumption. If a Zoroastrian seeks to buy a cake for consumption by non-Zoroastrians, that’s okay too.”
Is it acceptable to not sell cakes on Zoroastrians on the basis that they might take the act of eating the cake?
Nobody’s asking him to bake cakes for “all homosexual related activity imaginable”. They’re simply asking him to bake a wedding cake, which is a recognized and advertised part of the products and services he offers to the general public.
It is none of his business whether the clients who order one of the wedding cakes that he offers for sale to the general public are Jim and Nancy, or Lee and Chris, or Mary and Amy, or Thomas and Kristof.
As other posters have noted, if the baker happens to be religiously opposed to interracial marriage and procreation, would that make it okay for him to refuse to bake one of his advertised birthday cakes for a mixed-race child?
I believe some Christians interpret the Bible to mean that they shouldn’t commit homosexual acts. I don’t believe any religion on Earth prohibits baking a cake which will be served at an event in which two people commit their lives to one another.
Good luck getting an answer to that one, no matter how many times it is asked.
Magellan01:
Magellan01again:
Can you just be honest? Just say you want Christians to be able to force their religion on others, but you are against Muslims and other religions from doing the same. Shout about how America is supposedly a Christian nation, and some other bullshit.
I’m not going to respond to any reply you make to this post. I’ll just let Past Magellan01 argue against you.
Magellan01:
And even if it does, the baker has officially disclaimed any allegiance to any such religious prohibition the moment he takes out his first ad announcing “Bob’s Bakery, Wedding Cakes Our Specialty”.
If a core part of your fundamental business model is your declared willingness to bake and sell to the general public cakes which will be served at events in which two people commit their lives to one another—i.e., wedding cakes—then you are not ethically entitled to pick and choose which members of the general public you will sell them to.
Would you extend this position to philosophical beliefs? I’m a utilitarian. Should my right to follow my own philosophical beliefs trump all?