True. But it’s possible someone might enter or contact the business without knowing they’re strictly kosher. I have seen people attempt mixed orders of meat/dairy in a kosher restaurant before - in some cases it’s ignorance/forgetfulness, probably trolling once in awhile.
As Rivkah says, such a business could supply the parts of cheeseburgers for your later assembly. I suppose the cake equivalent would be supply a cake and decorating equipment?
“No, no, no - you have to supply the cheeseburgers already assembled! Not doing this is religious discrimination! You have to accommodate us!”
Huh. No, still not satisfied. I’d still like to come up with a good analogy not to excuse this, but to try to show the religious nutjob mindset better. I think they’re wrong, but I still want to understand their position from their viewpoint.
This is an interesting thought. Perhaps the event isn’t protected, but persons have events, so one’s refusal to support an event impacts the person holding it.
Ultimately, the purpose of the protection is to relieve people in these groups from having to venue shop for a business willing to accept them as customers. If this law doesn’t protect people from that, then it isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.
While refusing business to a straight person buying something for a gay wedding might not technically run afoul of the law, it’s inevitable that a gay person would want to buy something for their personal wedding. Gay people should not have to “pass” as straight, or hide their intentions, or trick a baker into accepting their business, that is exactly the type of burden the law is intended to lift.
Right. It’s common not to want to support or participate in something that you think is wrong, even if your refusal won’t actually prevent the wrong thing from happening.
One problem with that analogy is that, if I understand correctly, many of those (Jews) who keep kosher don’t believe that cooking or eating pork is inherently wrong for everybody, just that it’s forbidden for them.
IMO the essential legal distinction that @broomstick & @RivkahChaya are struggling to find is that the product must be completely within the normal course of the business’s scope of work, and the customer has obvious membership in a protected class and the reason the business balks is that membership in that same protected class. Whether the customer’s membership is the protected class is evident from their appearance, or from the nature of their order is immaterial; what matters is that the business forms the opinion that the customer is a member of the protected class.
As applied to a fully Kosher deli that might amount to me, an obvious Gentile (perhaps wearing a large crucifix around my neck), entering and ordering a #1 off the menu board and them saying “Sorry, we don’t serve Gentiles because they’re Gentile.”
As always with the law, figuring out someone’s reasons is tricky because people don’t often volunteer their reasons when they’re “bad” or illegal. But if they do, as some bakers really have, you’ve got a clear-cut case of illegal discrimination and this well-made point applies:
I’m not suggesting that ethics and the law are in perfect alignment; there’s lots of definitely legal behavior that’s IMO unethical. But for this discussion to go anywhere sensible IMO we each need to carefully specify whether we’re talking about the legal standard which is pretty well fixed in written law or the ethical standard that’s much more amorphous, with different communities having different “community standards”. Some of whose “ethics” may be pretty deplorable to others.
Not in NY they couldn’t. To be certified kosher, they either have to serve meat or milk but not both. If they did both, how could they ever keep the utensils and dishes apart.
I think this thread has gone off the rails. The crucial point wasn’t that the baker refused to sell to them because they were gay. His objection was being asked to decorate a cake with a message that he found personally offensive. He was a bigot; that is not in debate. But it made him uncomfortable to decorate wedding cake for John and Bill (names made up).
If I were a baker and asked to decorate a cake with “Stand up and stand by” (was that the message?) I would refuse.
But the “offensive message” was basically “I’m Gay”. This isn’t a gay person asking for “Death to Jews” to be put on a cake, it’s a gay person asking for “I’m happy being gay” on his cake.
The message is tightly bound to the concept that a homosexual person is living openly, and that is the very thing that our baker finds offensive.
Of course, the real punchline is that one couple can request a cake that literally has the message “Wedding Bells For Cameron and Riley” written on it with icing, and get it from that baker; and another couple, next in line, can then request an identical-looking cake that bears the exact same message — only to be told, uh, no, because you two aren’t like that other Cameron and Riley.
Funny how many current ~30 yos have androgenous names. Or rather during the era they were infants parents couldn’t decide whether many then-popular names was for boys or girls. So they used it for both in such numbers that now nobody knows.
I’ve got one such young couple living in my building. If I gave you their first names you’d have no idea whether they were both male, both female, or one of each. And if the latter, which was which.
Of the four possibilities, the one most people would probably select as most likely isn’t the right one.
Most names move from boy to girl-- Cameron is moving right now, and Emery is really popular with girls-- I’m suspecting a lot of parents like “Emily,” but want a little twist on it. Anyway, it was never as popular with boys as Cameron. I’m seeing girls named Avery and Elliot, although still seeing lots of boys with those names. They may be destined to be the rare permanent unisex name-- like Jody or Robin.
What always interests me is when a name moves from girl to boy.
Hudson is a hugely popular boys’ name right now, but a couple of generations ago, it was more commonly a girls’ name-- albeit, it was never a very common name.
I would think that photographers should have the right to choose which weddings they photograph, even if the reason is discriminatory. Suppose a photographer hates listening to evangelical sermons. They’re fine shooting at a mainstream church weddings, but refuse to shoot at evangelical churches. That’s religious discrimination, but I think the individual’s rights not to attend a church ceremony he dislikes should override the evangelical wedding couple’s right to choose that particular wedding photographer.
The discussion has not gone off the rails at all. This is the topic you put in the OP. You tried to relate this guy’s bigoted actions to other non-bigoted actions. We are thus showing these actions are not in fact comparable.
Your analogy was disproven early on. There was no message on the cake. Thus your comparison to making a cake with a particular message you disagree on a cake doesn’t work. Because no one is saying anyone should have to put a message they disagree with on a cake. No one argued that the guy should have to put a pro-gay message on the cake.
Thus someone tried to find another analogy that would be relevant, and brought up being kosher. So we pointed out the flaws in that. Mine is that “staying kosher” is not about avoiding participation in something. Keeping kosher is a set of rules, and the relevant rules are those that forbid cooking certain items in the first place. It would be analogous to a bakery that doesn’t make cakes because they think cakes are against their religion.
The points remains that there is no excuse for this baker to let his bigoted feelings get in the way of making the cake. There is no situation where a non-bigoted person would be required to do something bigoted.
The thread didn’t go off the rails. It’s just that the argument that we have to tolerate this guy’s bigotry because the alternative is that we might be forced to do something that is against our beliefs doesn’t work.
The problem is that this guy would have served the same exact product to someone had he not found out the people he was making it for were gay. That’s what makes it clearly a form of discrimination against gay people, and thus both illegal and morally wrong.
Both your argument and the kosher argument ignore that part: that the cake being provided would have been given if the couple getting married had been straight. It was not a cake with a message the baker disagreed with, and it was not something that the baker thought was wrong to make or would go against his certifications.
It was just that he found out they were gay, and treated differently than if they were straight. In business.
So you’re choosing to exercise your freedom of expression (which includes non-expression) by refusing to write a message you disagree with, even if it isn’t your message? That’s fine. I’m guessing you’d probably also refuse to decorate a cake with “Abolish Gay Marriage”. Again, that’s fine. But what happens when the baker down the road refuses to decorate a cake with “Support Gay Marriage”? Does freedom of expression depend on whether that expression can be viewed as discriminatory by a customer?
I don’t think you can do that as long as your comparison is with something that most people think is acceptable. Anything you compare it to would also have to be unacceptable.
I’m not sure a comparison is necessary to understand his viewpoint. His viewpoint is what he says: that, by baking a cake for a gay wedding, he would be in some way participating in a gay wedding, and that participating in said wedding is wrong–due to his religious beliefs.*
But if I have to do a comparison, it would be like you at your supermarket refusing to sell someone meat from the deli because you found out said meat was going to be used in an anti-masker party.
Unfortunately, the analogy breaks down in that discriminating against anti-maskers isn’t technically illegal, and definitely isn’t bigoted. The best I coul do is replace it with something that I don’t think your employer would want you to do.
* I disagree with this, because religious beliefs are not the same thing as personal beliefs. Religious beliefs are the organized set of beliefs shared by others in that particular branch of said religion. But, as far as I know, the guy’s religion does not actually say that baking a cake for someone he thinks is sinning is wrong, and does not make gay weddings a bigger sin than the rest. In short, he’s talking about his own personal beliefs that have been informed by his religion, but not the beliefs of his religion. I consider that using the religion as a scapegoat rather than taking personal responsibility for his own beliefs.
It can’t be, because any message can be seen as discriminatory by the customer. If there were a distinction, it would have to be whether the message is discriminatory–whether it legally counts as discriminatory (assuming we’re talking about the law).
That said, this is one place where I don’t think you can make such a distinction. As much as I don’t support it, “abolish gay marriage” is political advocacy message. It’s arguing that the government should do X. And I can’t see how you can outlaw that sort of thing in a democracy. That is where freedom of speech is needed. Not in the ability to say slurs, but in the ability to actually advocate for political action. You can’t have the people in power saying that certain political messages that they do not condone are illegal.
That is different from my believe that egregiously hateful bigotry should be considered as a possible additional exception to freedom of speech, same as libel, slander, perjury, false advertising, and so on. I can see the existence of hate speech laws in a country that has freedom of speech–in fact, several such countries already exist.
Continuing this hijack … An interesting meta-question is whether unisex names in general are becoming a) more common and b) more permanent. IOW, in addition to the traditional highly gendered biblical names will we see more and more people using names more or less interchangeably for their newborns?
One thought is yes, hyper-gendering is fading as a social custom and our kids can all be Camerons or whatever without harming their little psyches or destroying Western Civilization.
A countervailing thought is that 40 years ago a lot of the motivation for giving baby girls androgenous names was so they could “pass” as male in business. Naming your baby girl “Riley” would help her resume get looked at whereas naming her “Rita” would hurt.
That’s also where the fad for women using “J. Smith” professionally came from; it prevented Jane from being discriminated against before she even had a chance to compete on her merits.
As said discrimination dies out (assuming it has been and will continue to do so), the motivation for “passing” goes away and with it the desire to give baby girls “passable” names.
So which change will prevail going forward? I know I don’t know.
Some situation where there’s a conflict between the service and cultural appropriation maybe? For example, I’d expect that a Jewish restaurant that caters would be happy to cater for a Bar Mitzvah. They might also be happy to cater for a party held by non-Jews that like Jewish food. But they might object to catering a Bar Mitzvah themed party held by non-Jews. So in that hypothetical example, by refusing to cater for a non-Jewish Bar Mitzvah style party, the restaurant would be practicing religious discrimination. But should the non-Jews have a right to demand the restaurant must cater to them on civil rights grounds?
As an aside, I glanced at the Bar Mitzvah article on Wikipedia and found out that some Jews have second Bar Mitzvahs at the age of 83. Suppose the restaurant objected to the idea of second Bar Mitzvahs as untraditional. Age discrimination?
Getting back to the original question, my opinion (which i believe is close to the law, but may not be identical to the law) is that people who provide a product should provide it to anyone, for any legal purpose.
I have never seen a wedding cake with names on it. Most have bland floral decorations, or something nonverbal about the couple (i saw a Lego-themed cake, for instance, for a couple who liked games and puzzles.). So, if the baker is willing to sell a chocolate cake with white buttercream icing, decorated with candied violets, to Jane and Steve, that baker should sell the same cake to Jane and Eve.
If the baker has some heterosexual cake toppers and puts one on the first cake, i don’t think they have to find a source of homosexual cake toppers, but they should be willing to make the tiny accommodation of leaving off the cake topper for the second couple. They would presumably be willing to leave it off if Jane and Steve don’t care for cake toppers.
I don’t think there baker SHOULD be compelled to write “congratulations on your wedding, Jane & Eve” on the cake. That seems to be venturing into freedom of expression. That’s where I draw the line.