Ah, OK - pressure within the sect. Very well.
Or just doesn’t approve of who you are. It’s true there’s an appeal to letting the marketplace settle this (letting the photographers who will photograph same-sex couples do more business than the ones who won’t), but it’s also true that these sorts of bans can amount to freeze-outs of minorities and the result is not appealing.
Yep, that’s exactly what I’m saying.
You, on the other hand, have the right to complain to the manager, send letters to the local media, picket the restaurant, organize a boycott, ostracize the owners socially, etc. But you don’t have the right to force or the threat of force, which is what you’re doing when you drag the state into it.
Okay, so at least we clearly know where you stand.
However, in the real world, where we have collectively decided that one of the legitimate functions of government in the US is to pro-actively prevent businesses from discriminating against certain customers based on their race, religion, and (in many cases) sexual orientation, that opinion is useless in deciding the merits of the case in question.
Sorry, you can’t complain about an umpire’s call by saying you would prefer to play a different sport.
I just want to be clear, would this also encompass cases where ‘not wanting to’ is on account of the customer being Black, Disabled, Female, etc?
So, the Supreme Court was wrong, the Civil Rights Act was wrong, and 50 years of social change was wrong? You must hate living in 21st century America!
It is legal for you to disapprove of the way someone lives. Go for it. Announce it. Disapprove to your heart’s content. Hurt anyone’s feelings you want.
However, if you run a public business, and you deny service to a person because they are a member of a defined class of people, this is a violation of their rights and is illegal.
Do you not understand the basic premise at work here?
He seems to understand it just fine. He doesn’t agree with it, which is distinctly a minority opinion these days. I’m not sorry about that even though I do have mixed feelings about its application in this case, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t get it.
You don’t know Lonesome Polecat very well, do you? Hating living in 21st Century America is his raison d’etre…
Let’s not turn this into a Lonesome Polecat thread, please? We’ve had plenty already, and it was a tangent anyway.
Well he seems to think that the law is in place to keep “feelings from being hurt”, rather than to deal with public businesses who deny service to distinctive groups of people based on bigotry.
The law does not give a shit about “feelings being hurt”. It does give a shit about denial of service by a public business.
It appears he thinks bigotry in the marketplace is nothing worse than feelings being hurt.
That’s how he is (wrongly) describing the effects of those denials rather than, say, noting that people who are denied basic services are effectively being shut out of society entirely since it’ll be nearly impossible for them to replicate all the services they can’t use. Anyway rather than going down that road I’d be interested to hear Farmer Jane explain the differences between this type of discrimination and racial discrimination. Somebody has to do it eventually, right? 
I most certainly don’t mean to be insulting! I’m not sure where you grew up, Miller, but I come from a place where having a same sex ceremony is political. (Iowa) In fact, ssm regulations that were won through the courts started as political statements. Just like sit-ins did.
They would be discriminating on the basis of religion.
No, but these are things that are open to the public. They’re physical. What the lady was providing was services. I think when it comes to ‘services’, a couple of decades ago Civil Rights law only applied to the essentials (e.g., a doctor).
This is a weird country. Pharmacists can refuse birth control and doctors can refuse it in an ER but photographers are fined $6,000 for not entering into a contract with a gay couple.
Finally - and I know this is unpopular - but it could also be that the photographer was physically uncomfortable with a same-sex ceremony. For a lot of people, gays and lesbians are still ‘sexual deviants’. It’s quite possible, if not likely, that filming the ceremony would have made her feel violated because she found it sexual in nature. Remember that loooong thread in which you bashed me for hating Pride parades?
I’m a little disappointed that few people in this thread have acknowledged that the photographer has rights as well.
I’m Jewish and I wouldn’t want a doctor to circumcise my child if he/she was against it. I wouldn’t want to force a famous musician to perform at my political rally if they were against it (and in some states, political ideology is protected). There’s no way that the government can tell everyone to play nice and be fair. It just doesn’t work. Humans don’t work that way.
We have two competing parties who are in a fight for liberty. That’s serious. So I think before we start chipping away at someone’s liberty, we have to think really, really hard about it.
People have said that she has the right to be a bigot, but that she doesn’t have the right to enter into state commerce and be a bigot. A right to a profession is pretty standard here in the States. “Oh, you can not agree with ssm but if you don’t enter into contracts with gay couples we’ll fine the shit out of you and run your business down. Your choice!” That’s not much of a choice. It carries about the same weight as “Oh, you’re gay? You can get married…just not to someone of your own gender. Your choice!”
I don’t think homosexuality is a choice - get real - but some people do enter into partnerships because they want to, not because they absolutely have no other choice, period. But that’s not really my issue. I don’t believe religious people can ‘help it’ either, no more than I could help voting Democrat or my neighbor Republican.
While you can’t help being gay or black, the objection by the photographer was about an action, not a state of being. Just like I think she should be able to refuse to photograph a polygamous ceremony (which is not allowed under NM law).
Now, I’d be on the gay couples’ side if the photographer had a policy of not extending services to gay people. She also does portraits and such, so if someone she knew was gay solicited her services to photograph them for their Realtor website or whatever, and she refused on those grounds, that’s a much clearer violation of the law.
I keep saying this.
Not necessarily. You don’t have to be religious to be polygamous or opposed to polygamy.
This is exactly where this discussion got started. The photographers offer their services to the public, which is to say their business is open to the public. If the argument here is that this is different because they don’t have a building, that’s not very convincing because they may very well have a photo studio where they photograph clients.
Something I’m opposed to (and which we have discussed surprisingly little in this thread). I think these kinds of exemptions have gotten out of control.
Maybe. Do we need to care about this?
You can’t.
I’ve already made that point, and I didn’t say you think sexuality is a choice.
Yes, again, I already pointed this out. So what? Some people are opposed to interracial dating and marriage, and they justified their views based on the same kinds of grounds. So why is that action abhorrent and this one acceptable?
She does: she photographs weddings and won’t do same-sex ceremonies. Since only gay people have those kinds of weddings, she’s excluding them specifically. It’s not like she was vague or unclear in her emails.
P.S. If someone could please find the case where a white woman was shunned by her church and her pastor refused to marry her to a black man, I’d appreciate it. I think it was in TN. I learned about it on the Dope, but have no idea what happened after the story broke.
No, but people who practice it are doing it under the auspices of religion, and in NM, it appears you can’t discriminate based on spousal status. So she couldn’t discriminate against that fictional group.
Good points. There are a lot of angles I think the photographer has, but that wasn’t my strongest. Again, public accommodations law varies from state to state…in some states, political ideology IS PROTECTED, so that means artists would have to provide services for people they don’t agree with. Artist for hire and all that.
Yes. And I’m off to work.
(:
Some of them are and some of them aren’t. You don’t have to be a fundamentalism Muslim or Mormon to be a polygamist.
Uh, you don’t have to be gay to have a same sex commitment ceremony…?
What?
Let’s just say for the sake of the argument that they are, since that’s the overwhelming majority. This is MY fictional couple here. Don’t mess it up! :mad: