Should Christians Be Forced to Photograph Gay Weddings?

[Sudden_Kestrel]

@ITR_champion

Nonetheless I don’t find what you’re saying here convincing. Phrases such as “crushing souls” and “relegating gay and lesbian citizens to second-class status” are vague and don’t mean anything specific. Indeed some might suspect that their utility lies in their vagueness, and that some people use them to push emotional buttons without actually having any specifics in mind. Good laws cannot be based on such vagueness. A government should be able to state a precise reason why a law exists.

As for the mention of “classes of people that have traditionally suffered widespread discrimination”, that opens up a huge can of worms because the number of such classes is endless. Have BDSM fans traditionally suffered widespread discrimination? How about fat people? Or vegetarians? Nerds? Left-handers? All these groups and many others could make a claim that they’ve been discriminated against. Once the government starts to award the privilege of bossing others around to certain groups based on past instances of discrimination, where does it end?

Under federal law legal protections already exist for certain classes of people based on race, gender, age and national origin, and New Mexico has added protection based on sexual orientation to its law. Is it protection for all of those classes that you object to, or is it the idea of adding sexual orientation to the list of protected classes?

We are in agreement on the value of terms like “soul-crushing” and “second-class citizen” in a legal document, but this discussion is not a legal document. The issue of a very large class of people being subject to the behaviors at the core of this particular case will naturally be emotional, and terms that reflect that emotion aren’t out of place. Removing them from the debate doesn’t make it more informative or easier to understand, but it does make it easier to dismiss the emotional pain caused by the actions in question. For my part, the emotional toll of discrimination is the issue.

BDSM fans, obese people, nerds, and left-handers (?) will have to fight their own fight. There was a time when the only protections applied were for gender and race, and then age and national origin were added in. I hope that sexual orientation will one day make that list on a federal level, but in the meantime some states have chosen to add it on their own. Perhaps someday some of the groups you mentioned (except for the damned lefties :mad:) might also be listed as protected classes. (I have doubts about obese people gaining protected status. By the time I get up the energy to get off the couch and vote, more than 50% of us will be obese and no longer a minority.)

I don’t really have the time ATM to research why other people and courts think particular classes deserve protection, but IMHO it’s at least in part because they are the groups most likely to suffer discrimination. Hell, I’d prefer to hire a nerd for a lot of jobs. I haven’t seen much evidence that fat people such as myself are discriminated against in employment, but I’m sure it happens—just not on a widespread basis and not with the tacit approval of government and business leaders. I think we’ll also see some action against discrimination on the basis of personal habits such as smoking or eating poorly (or BDSM :p).

If a legal wrong has been done to some group, they may file a lawsuit and if they win, they get fiscally compensated. That’s the right way to deal with such issues. Trying to correct past discrimination with extra privileges in the present is the wrong way. If gays and certain other groups are awarded the privilege of bossing others around, then that literally does split society into legal classes, with the bossing groups in the upper class and the rest in the lower class.

You do know, of course, that this is exactly what happened in the case under discussion. The plaintiff appealed that decision, claiming protection under the First Amendment, but the appeals court upheld the lower court’s decision, which prompted the now-banned GEEPERS to go all “ANTI-CHRISTIAN ALERT!” and post the OP.

I had to laugh because your comments about how the gays would be able to “boss” all the non-gays into a lower-class state reminded me of a rare argument I had with my husband years ago. He was in the living room watching the news and yelled angrily at the TV, “Why should the white men have to give up their rights?!” I muttered to myself, “Because it’s their turn” and set off a temper tantrum and then an ensuing “discussion” that has never been duplicated in our marriage. (Thank goodness!) While my comment was partly in jest, there was some truth to it as well. Sometimes what you describe as “extra privileges” are really only normal privileges given extra importance in order to make sure they are provided justly. There’s really nothing extra being offered, just special protections to avoid repeating behaviors that we have come to believe are inimical to a compassionate society.

[DrFidelius]

… What could compel the hypothetical completely free market to provide services to a minority group, when sufficient profit can be made by catering to the majority?

[panache45]

@DrFidelius

… What could compel the hypothetical completely free market to provide services to a minority group, when sufficient profit can be made by catering to the majority?

The fact that a greater profit can be made by catering to everybody. Sometimes “sufficient” isn’t enough.

[panache45]

@ITR_champion

As for the mention of “classes of people that have traditionally suffered widespread discrimination”, that opens up a huge can of worms because the number of such classes is endless. Have BDSM fans traditionally suffered widespread discrimination? How about fat people? Or vegetarians? Nerds? Left-handers? All these groups and many others could make a claim that they’ve been discriminated against. Once the government starts to award the privilege of bossing others around to certain groups based on past instances of discrimination, where does it end?

If a legal wrong has been done to some group, they may file a lawsuit and if they win, they get fiscally compensated. That’s the right way to deal with such issues. Trying to correct past discrimination with extra privileges in the present is the wrong way. If gays and certain other groups are awarded the privilege of bossing others around, then that literally does split society into legal classes, with the bossing groups in the upper class and the rest in the lower class.

The difference is that vegetarians and nerds haven’t suffered historical discrimination ***at the hands of the government ***the way gay people have. It wasn’t that long ago that gay sex was illegal . . . and yes, there were times when those laws were enforced, with horrible consequences. And I’m old enough to remember when patrons of gay bars were routinely roughed up or even sexually assaulted by the Vice Squad, only to have their names, addresses and places of employment printed in the newspapers. This often lead to breakups of families, employment, and even suicide. This was all because of persecution at the hand of the government . . . a discrimination that vegetarians can’t quite claim.

And nobody is demanding “extra privileges.” All we want is to be treated like everyone else.

[Zeriel]

@DrFidelius

… What could compel the hypothetical completely free market to provide services to a minority group, when sufficient profit can be made by catering to the majority?

@panache45

The fact that a greater profit can be made by catering to everybody. Sometimes “sufficient” isn’t enough.

Not always true, naturally–see also the segregated lunch counters. It was often the case that business owners in a climate with a particularly nasty form of majority could gain EXTRA majority business by making assurances that amounted to “none of their dirty minority hands has ever touched that counter”.

[Euphonious_Polemic]

@panache45

The fact that a greater profit can be made by catering to everybody. Sometimes “sufficient” isn’t enough.

How do you explain, then, the fact that this hypothetical free market has never (to my knowledge) operated this way for minority groups suffering from denial of services?

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@Muffin

Thanks for your posts of the decisions, RNATB.

@mister_nyx

Seconded.

My pleasure.

@VegasReno

but the state in the same respect can’t force you to enter into a contract… and by the way, that’s what they are doing here.

No, they are not. The state is imposing general regulations on any business which holds itself out as available to the public.

The state also (hopefully) prohibits dairies from supplying grocery stores with milk containing arsenic. Why are they being forced to supply arsenic-free milk? What happened to their freedom?

@ITR_champion

Not at the present time. Who knows what groups the left will decide to award special privileges to in the years to come?

In the Constitution I can find the guarantee of freedom of religious expression and freedom of speech quite easily, whereas I cannot find the freedom to force businesses to come to your wedding and perform a service there.

It’s called the 14th Amendment.

@ITR_champion

I never said that pornographers or swingers were treated as a protected class anywhere. Instead I specifically said that it could happen in the future. Therefore the fact that it’s not happening in the present has no relevance to what I said.

@ITR_champion

No, what I believe is that all persons, regardless of their sexual tastes, should have freedom to engage in the exact same sort of commerce, namely free commerce, which is commerce where both parties chose freely to participate.

@ITR_champion

New Mexico now has a law saying that people with one particular sexual taste have the privilege to force any business person they wish to appear at an event and deliver them services.

According to the law, a photographer could legally refuse to photograph a wedding because the bride is too short, or because the groom has a mustache, or because the bridesmaids are wearing green, or because they’re driving to the church in a Chevy rather than a Ford, or for any of countless other dumb reasons. The photographer simply can’t refuse to do a wedding because it’s a gay wedding. So those the law treat short brides as “second-class citizens”? Does it “crush the soul” of men with mustaches?

Your posts in this thread betray two things: one, you don’t really understand the constitutional authority for the Civil Rights Act; and, two, that sexual orientation is not a “sexual taste”. I find the latter weird, because I know from your previous posts that you are aware- unlike many whose political leanings are driven by their faith- that sexual orientation is immutable.

The latter is less surprising, because there is a commonly held view that civil rights legislation singles out certain groups for special treatment. This view is fundamentally incorrect.

Civil rights legislation singles out certain types of group for special treatment. The same constitutional provision that requires New Mexico public accommodations to serve gay customers also forces them to serve straight customers. Strict scrutiny is applied not only to laws which discriminate against black people, but those which discriminate against white people or any other minority. That’s why affirmative action programs based around fixed quotas have invariably been struck down as inconsistent with equal protection.

To address your hypotheticals, this is why the law doesn’t treat short brides as second class citizens. Tall or medium-sized brides are equally unprotected from discrimination, but that’s not the point. The point is that the people of New Mexico have made it the public policy of that state that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is unwelcome.

To be sure, in some dimly imagined future you may see extensions of civil rights laws to include sexual proclivities generally as worthy of protection, assuming anyone could draft such a law without it being unconstitutionally vague. You may, indeed, find your religious freedom to discriminate against sluts compromised. However, if you deny the right of the state to determine what forms of discrimination are incompatible with the guarantee of equal protection, you also deny it the right to enact any type of civil rights legislation.

Your gripe seems to be that if gays can be protected, who can’t? The real question is if gays can’t be protected, who can? How else would you interpret the Equal Protection Clause, or similar state laws?

@ITR_champion

Contrary to what you might think after reading some posts around here, homosexuals in America today are not treated as blacks were in the South sixty years ago. There are not daily bombings and burnings of their buildings, as there were of black churches then. State governments do not take away the right to vote from gays. Indeed as this thread shows us, gays use state governments to strip rights away from other people.

How many gay people have to be blown up or murdered before they merit protection, exactly?

@DrFidelius

… What could compel the hypothetical completely free market to provide services to a minority group, when sufficient profit can be made by catering to the majority?

Theoretically, the modern trend towards national or global retail/business operations would fix a situation like the white-only downtown businesses of the 20th-century South. That is, Al’s Hardware of Mobile, Alabama could get away with not serving black customers in 1955, but Wal-Mart sure as hell couldn’t because it wouldn’t just be its Alabama stores being boycotted. That, and nobody eats at lunch counters anymore.

[Miller]

@ITR_champion

However, the current attempt by the left to link all their issues to the civil rights struggle and to invoke emotional phrases such as “second-class citizens” and “spirit of evil” strikes me as silly. Contrary to what you might think after reading some posts around here, homosexuals in America today are not treated as blacks were in the South sixty years ago. There are not daily bombings and burnings of their buildings, as there were of black churches then. State governments do not take away the right to vote from gays. Indeed as this thread shows us, gays use state governments to strip rights away from other people.

So, would it be accurate to say that you think the Civil Rights Movement erred in passing laws protecting race, when it should have been passing laws specifically to protect blacks? That is to say, do you think that a lunch counter in 1968 should have been forced to admit blacks, but been allowed to discriminate against Mexicans? Along those same lines, if I operated a public business, should I be legally allowed to refuse to do business with Christians, as Christians have never suffered anything like systematic persecution in this country?

Also, you say that these protections are no longer necessary. While our society has changed enough that it no longer countenances that level of violent prejudice, do you think our government should do anything to ensure that we never return to that level of violent prejudice? And if there are other groups that are legitimately at risk of being subjected to that sort of prejudice, should the government not act to ensure that we do not reach that point?

As for the mention of “classes of people that have traditionally suffered widespread discrimination”, that opens up a huge can of worms because the number of such classes is endless. Have BDSM fans traditionally suffered widespread discrimination? How about fat people? Or vegetarians? Nerds? Left-handers? All these groups and many others could make a claim that they’ve been discriminated against. Once the government starts to award the privilege of bossing others around to certain groups based on past instances of discrimination, where does it end?

Throwing in “past” there in the last sentence is a bit of a game changer, isn’t it? No one is arguing that gays should be protected because of how we were treated in the 1800s - we’re arguing that gay rights is necessary because of how gay people are being treated right now.

As for the rest of the paragraph, can you explain why that slippery slope applies only when the subject is gay rights, and not when the subject is the Civil Rights Movement? I mean, yes, black people demonstrably suffered far more than any of those groups did, which you say justifies the Civil Rights Act. But gay people also have demonstrably suffered far more than any of those groups. The only difference here is how much institutionalized prejudice is allowed before the government intervenes. I think the line should be drawn to include gay people. You think other wise. Rather than a fallacious argument against line drawing altogether (because you’ve already given up the game on that one when you agreed that the Civil Rights Act was an acceptable function of government) I think you need to demonstrate that the prejudice suffered by gays in this country isn’t really all that bad.

[ITR_champion]

@Miller

Throwing in “past” there in the last sentence is a bit of a game changer, isn’t it? No one is arguing that gays should be protected because of how we were treated in the 1800s - we’re arguing that gay rights is necessary because of how gay people are being treated right now.

As for the rest of the paragraph, can you explain why that slippery slope applies only when the subject is gay rights, and not when the subject is the Civil Rights Movement? I mean, yes, black people demonstrably suffered far more than any of those groups did, which you say justifies the Civil Rights Act. But gay people also have demonstrably suffered far more than any of those groups. The only difference here is how much institutionalized prejudice is allowed before the government intervenes. I think the line should be drawn to include gay people. You think other wise. Rather than a fallacious argument against line drawing altogether (because you’ve already given up the game on that one when you agreed that the Civil Rights Act was an acceptable function of government) I think you need to demonstrate that the prejudice suffered by gays in this country isn’t really all that bad.

Given that every university I attended had a Queer Studies program and a small galaxy of programs devoted to making those of every conceivable sexual preference feel comfortable, given the proliferation of gay versions of everything from sports clubs to vacation plans, given the fact that gays are on average wealthier than others, given the unusually large numbers of gays at at least one top university, given the large presence and overwhelmingly positive portrayal of gays in the media, and given all other visible evidence that gays are doing just fine, I don’t see any argument for treating the current situation as an emergency comparable to what southern blacks endured fifty years ago. As I said earlier, a mass terrorism campaign lead by state governments against blacks is oppression, but a person who chooses not to take photographs at a wedding is not oppression.

What the civil rights marchers wanted was, in Rev. King’s words, “our Constitutional and God-given rights”. They wanted to vote, to attend decent schools, to drink from decent water fountains, and so forth. Much later part of the movement went off the rails and started doing ridiculous things. As the case that sparked this thread shows, the gay rights movement has fast-forwarded to the ridiculous part, having no need to fight for the right to vote or to drink from a working water fountain.

[mister_nyx]

@ITR_champion

Given that every university I attended had a Queer Studies program and a small galaxy of programs devoted to making those of every conceivable sexual preference feel comfortable

I just checked; the university I attended still offers no queer studies major. Which universities are you talking about?

Obviously nothing in your post goes to support the idea that queer people shouldn’t benefit from the status of a protected class, but it’s been obvious throughout your participation in this thread that you don’t have an argument to that effect so this bluster is unsurprising. But seriously, I’m interested in which universities you went to that offer queer studies programs. Because certainly most don’t. Wikipedia says that “There are currently over 40 certificate and degree granting programs with at least five institutions in the United States offering an undergraduate major” so it’s clear that only a tiny minority of educational institutions offer queer studies programs.

[Kyomara]

@ITR_champion

Given that every university I attended had a Queer Studies program and a small galaxy of programs devoted to making those of every conceivable sexual preference feel comfortable, given the proliferation of gay versions of everything from sports clubs to vacation plans, given the fact that gays are on average wealthier than others, given the unusually large numbers of gays at at least one top university, given the large presence and overwhelmingly positive portrayal of gays in the media, and given all other visible evidence that gays are doing just fine, I don’t see any argument for treating the current situation as an emergency comparable to what southern blacks endured fifty years ago.

So your view is that since a lot of gay people are generally doing OK as a group, gay individuals ought to just be willing to accept a certain amount of discrimination?

Does a group need to be bombed and slaughtered before they are worth protecting?

[mister_nyx]

@Kyomara

Does a group need to be bombed and slaughtered before they are worth protecting?

Surely we’re not going to pretend that LGBT people aren’t ever “slaughtered” for it, are we?

[dngnb8]

@ITR_champion

Given that every university I attended had a Queer Studies program and a small galaxy of programs devoted to making those of every conceivable sexual preference feel comfortable, given the proliferation of gay versions of everything from sports clubs to vacation plans, given the fact that gays are on average wealthier than others, given the unusually large numbers of gays at at least one top university, given the large presence and overwhelmingly positive portrayal of gays in the media, and given all other visible evidence that gays are doing just fine, I don’t see any argument for treating the current situation as an emergency comparable to what southern blacks endured fifty years ago. As I said earlier, a mass terrorism campaign lead by state governments against blacks is oppression, but a person who chooses not to take photographs at a wedding is not oppression.

What the civil rights marchers wanted was, in Rev. King’s words, “our Constitutional and God-given rights”. They wanted to vote, to attend decent schools, to drink from decent water fountains, and so forth. Much later part of the movement went off the rails and started doing ridiculous things. As the case that sparked this thread shows, the gay rights movement has fast-forwarded to the ridiculous part, having no need to fight for the right to vote or to drink from a working water fountain.

Given the fact that Gays are taxed higher then heterosexuals. Given the fact that Gays partners are not considered next of kin in an emergency. Given the fact that Estate Laws penalize gays.

[FinnAgain]

Come now, dngnb8, ITR is right. The gays want special, super privileges.Ya know like the civil rights the rest of us enjoy on a daily basis without having to fight for them. What’re those fags even thinking? Obviously their average higher income level balances out their average higher suicide level. And it isn’t like it’s illegal for a gay man to marry a woman. Whiny queers.

[mister_nyx]

For the record, I notice he linked to a decidedly non-academic source for the claim that gay people tend to be wealthier than straight people. I don’t have any citations to hand but when I was in college I did a bunch of research on the issue for a paper about queer people’s economic state. Gay male couples tend to be better off than straight couples, although by a slightly smaller margin than would be predicted on the basis of the fact that men earn more (i.e. two higher-earning men, so gay male couples had more money than male-female couples, though statistically still suffering a small penalty for being gay.) Lesbian couples tend to be much, much worse off than straight couples, in part again due to the gender difference in earnings. Trans people are, not surprisingly, vastly worse off economically than cisgender people. (I mention them here because marriage equality is, in some cases, an issue for straight trans people, as a person’s gender identity can easily be at odds with their legal gender, thus making a marriage between a man and a woman nonetheless illegal.)

So it’s not really the case that LGBT people are better off economically than straight people.

[ITR_champion]

@Really_Not_All_That_Bright

It’s called the 14th Amendment.
…
The latter is less surprising, because there is a commonly held view that civil rights legislation singles out certain groups for special treatment. This view is fundamentally incorrect.

Civil rights legislation singles out certain types of group for special treatment. The same constitutional provision that requires New Mexico public accommodations to serve gay customers also forces them to serve straight customers. Strict scrutiny is applied not only to laws which discriminate against black people, but those which discriminate against white people or any other minority. That’s why affirmative action programs based around fixed quotas have invariably been struck down as inconsistent with equal protection.

To address your hypotheticals, this is why the law doesn’t treat short brides as second class citizens. Tall or medium-sized brides are equally unprotected from discrimination, but that’s not the point. The point is that the people of New Mexico have made it the public policy of that state that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is unwelcome.

Legal rulings regarding affirmative action are an impossible tangle of nonsense and contradictions, as are legal rulings on so many topics. In some cases the courts have ruled that it’s illegal to treat one race better than another, in other cases they’ve ruled that it’s perfectly legal. For instance just look at Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger, where the Supreme Court said that the U. of Michigan could give blacks preference in law school admissions but not undergraduate admissions. So there are some cases where the government treats members of one race better than another. Likewise based on recent lawsuits it seems to be legal to operate a dating service that serves homosexuals but not heterosexuals while the reverse is illegal. The government does single out certain groups for preferential treatment.

To be sure, in some dimly imagined future you may see extensions of civil rights laws to include sexual proclivities generally as worthy of protection, assuming anyone could draft such a law without it being unconstitutionally vague. You may, indeed, find your religious freedom to discriminate against sluts compromised. However, if you deny the right of the state to determine what forms of discrimination are incompatible with the guarantee of equal protection, you also deny it the right to enact any type of civil rights legislation.

Your gripe seems to be that if gays can be protected, who can’t? The real question is if gays can’t be protected, who can? How else would you interpret the Equal Protection Clause, or similar state laws?

First of all, the category of civil rights law is broad, and what I’ve said in this thread concerning the freedom of business owners doesn’t touch on most of it including the more important parts such as right to vote.

Second, by approaching this debate only from the angle of equal protection for groups you ignore my main point. I approach this from the angle of the business owner and his freedom. For most of American history business owners were free to decide what contracts they would and wouldn’t take, and the very idea of the business owner being forced to take a contract against his will–outside of war and emergency situations–would have seemed absurd to everybody. What’s happening in this case is exactly that. A photographer is being sued simply because he chose not to take a particular contract. In other words, the government is now using coercion to force a business owner to take a contract. (Regardless of how often Marley insists otherwise.) What I believe is that freedom is good, and the government should remove a person’s freedom only when they have a durn good reason for doing so. In the South in 1963 they had a durn good reason for doing so. In New Mexico in 2012 they do not. When I present the argument in these terms, the most common response I’ve gotten from some other posters boils down to “we as a society passed the law so nyah nyah”. (Of course, with laws that the gay rights movement doesn’t agree with, their attitude towards “we as a society” tends to be quite different.) But that’s not a logical argument for why the photographer’s freedom should be taken away. No one seems to want to present a case for why a photographer saying “no, I won’t takes photos at your wedding” is such a horrible thing that it merits removing the photographer’s freedom.

(One thing that I don’t think anyone’s mentioned yet is that all contract law is based on the assumption that parties enter into contracts freely. If I hold a gun to your head and order you to sign a contract, no court would ever consider the contract to be valid. If a photographer is required by law to enter a contract to photograph a gay wedding, likewise that contract could never be considered valid. In short, it’s the same problem that plagues ObamaCare’s health insurance mandate.)

[ITR_champion]

@Kyomara

So your view is that since a lot of gay people are generally doing OK as a group, gay individuals ought to just be willing to accept a certain amount of discrimination?

No, I’ve never said that, nor anything that could be rationally interpreted as meaning that. Certain posters have dishonestly implied that I’m in favor of discrimination against gays. If gays or anyone else wishes to deal with a case of discrimination by boycotting, generating publicity, and other such means they have my blessing. What I’m in favor of is freedom, including the freedom to enter or not enter contracts freely.

It seems worth recalling that when Liam Stacey was sentenced in March, the general response on the SDMB and elsewhere could be summarized as 'yeah he’s despicable, but the law should not be involved. The purpose of the law is not to tell everyone exactly what they should and should not do. Most folks support that concept in other cases, so I don’t see why it shouldn’t apply in this case.

[mister_nyx]

@ITR_champion

(One thing that I don’t think anyone’s mentioned yet is that all contract law is based on the assumption that parties enter into contracts freely. If I hold a gun to your head and order you to sign a contract, no court would ever consider the contract to be valid. If a photographer is required by law to enter a contract to photograph a gay wedding, likewise that contract could never be considered valid. In short, it’s the same problem that plagues ObamaCare’s health insurance mandate.)

Obviously this is not a valid argument. It raises a problem that only exists when interpreted under your imaginary Constitution. With the real Constitution, as interpreted by real jurists, anti-discrimination legislation is perfectly acceptable, and special protections for particular protected classes are even mandated.

Also, you’re moving goalposts here, since before you were arguing that LGBT people don’t deserve protection because somehow we haven’t had to endure enough. Now you’re making an argument that no one does.

The fact that your arguments aren’t even compatible with each other is pretty clear evidence that they’re just rationalizations.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@ITR_champion

Legal rulings regarding affirmative action are an impossible tangle of nonsense and contradictions, as are legal rulings on so many topics. In some cases the courts have ruled that it’s illegal to treat one race better than another, in other cases they’ve ruled that it’s perfectly legal. For instance just look at Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger, where the Supreme Court said that the U. of Michigan could give blacks preference in law school admissions but not undergraduate admissions. So there are some cases where the government treats members of one race better than another.

If you had read my post carefully- or read Gratz and Grutter carefully- you would have seen the distinction between the two cases: quotas. The University of Michigan Law School’s admissions policy was designed to produce a diverse student body, in which ethnicity was one factor of many (age, sex, socioeconomic status, prior experience, and so on).

The undergraduate affirmative action policy was a rigid mathematical formula in which black applicants automatically received a point bonus that effectively guaranteed them admission over other qualified students.

It wasn’t some kind of accident that Gratz and Grutter were decided at the same time but went opposite ways; the Court was making a point about what sort of racial classifications in admissions are okay, and which ones are not.

[QUOTE=Me]
Strict scrutiny is applied not only to laws which discriminate against black people, but those which discriminate against white people or any other minority. That’s why affirmative action programs based around fixed quotas have invariably been struck down as inconsistent with equal protection.
[/QUOTE]

Likewise based on recent lawsuits it seems to be legal to operate a dating service that serves homosexuals but not heterosexuals while the reverse is illegal. The government does single out certain groups for preferential treatment.

You know better than to cite an editorial piece as some sort of authoritative statement of the law. Never mind that the issues in question haven’t even been litigated yet.

First of all, the category of civil rights law is broad, and what I’ve said in this thread concerning the freedom of business owners doesn’t touch on most of it including the more important parts such as right to vote.

Second, by approaching this debate only from the angle of equal protection for groups you ignore my main point. I approach this from the angle of the business owner and his freedom. For most of American history business owners were free to decide what contracts they would and wouldn’t take, and the very idea of the business owner being forced to take a contract against his will–outside of war and emergency situations–would have seemed absurd to everybody. What’s happening in this case is exactly that. A photographer is being sued simply because he chose not to take a particular contract. In other words, the government is now using coercion to force a business owner to take a contract. (Regardless of how often Marley insists otherwise.) What I believe is that freedom is good, and the government should remove a person’s freedom only when they have a durn good reason for doing so. In the South in 1963 they had a durn good reason for doing so. In New Mexico in 2012 they do not. When I present the argument in these terms, the most common response I’ve gotten from some other posters boils down to “we as a society passed the law so nyah nyah”. (Of course, with laws that the gay rights movement doesn’t agree with, their attitude towards “we as a society” tends to be quite different.) But that’s not a logical argument for why the photographer’s freedom should be taken away. No one seems to want to present a case for why a photographer saying “no, I won’t takes photos at your wedding” is such a horrible thing that it merits removing the photographer’s freedom.

(One thing that I don’t think anyone’s mentioned yet is that all contract law is based on the assumption that parties enter into contracts freely. If I hold a gun to your head and order you to sign a contract, no court would ever consider the contract to be valid. If a photographer is required by law to enter a contract to photograph a gay wedding, likewise that contract could never be considered valid. In short, it’s the same problem that plagues ObamaCare’s health insurance mandate.)

The business owner has all the freedom in the world. Nobody was “forced” to do anything in this situation. Like it or not, governments have always imposed limitations and restrictions on freedom of contract, not that any such freedom appears in the Constitution.

If the photographers wanted to discriminate, there’s one very good way to go about it: don’t go into a business where you might have to do things you find icky?

If a business wants to discriminate, there are lots of ways it can go about it. In this case, the business held itself out as open to the public. It didn’t limit its advertising to “traditional wedding” magazines. It didn’t make any sort of representations about who its services were or were not available to. It advertised on a website, in the yellow pages, and in local newspapers.

Unless you’re willing to answer the earlier question- how many gays have to be blown up before equal protection legislation may include sexual orientation- the distinctions between sexual orientation and race are meaningless.

It seems worth recalling that when Liam Stacey was sentenced in March, the general response on the SDMB and elsewhere could be summarized as 'yeah he’s despicable, but the law should not be involved. The purpose of the law is not to tell everyone exactly what they should and should not do. Most folks support that concept in other cases, so I don’t see why it shouldn’t apply in this case.

I can’t see how it’s worth recalling. It was a completely unrelated issue in a different country.

[FinnAgain]

@ITR_champion

I’m in favor of discrimination against gays. […] What I’m in favor of is freedom, including the freedom to enter or not enter contracts freely.

You’ll do better maintaining your righteous indignation if you don’t put paid to your claims one bit to the next. Just sayin’, is all.