It’s a complicated issue. I suggest you read the wikipedia article on RFRA.
So, it seems the distinction is between the provider and the consumer:
Provider may offer (sometimes based on his beliefs):
Kosher and/or non Kosher, Ham, Tofu, Cake, wedding cake, closed on Friday, Saturday or Sunday
The consumer may select (sometimes based on his beliefs):
Kosher or Non-Kosher or Ham, Tofu etc on any day the establishment is open
Religious freedom prevails when the provider has no moral interest in the selections of the consumer and the consumer has no moral interest in the offerings of the provider.
Crane
John Mace,
RFRA removes my defense against the arbitrary whims of everyone I encounter.
Crane
The problem is that some people assert an interest in someone else’s right to do business, based on their own (usually non-canonical) religious beliefs.
Ordinarily, the baker should have no moral interest in the customer he bakes a cake for. But some bigots have been demanding that they do have an interest, and that they should be allowed to discriminate in public accommodation on the basis of that pretended interest.
One of the problems with this is that there isn’t any way to contain this madness, and slippery slope objections begin to pertain. If a baker can refuse to bake for a gay customer, why couldn’t he also refuse to bake for a Jewish customer, a black customer, a Catholic customer, a divorced customer, etc., all of which are offensive (!) to some religious denominations.
Actually, I’m betting that if they went into the soul food kitchen without their sheets and crosses and ordered a half dozen trays of ribs and chicken and a big tray of collards and big tray of mac and cheese they’d get served, no problem. I buy a huge takeout barbecue supper at a rib joint every Christmas Eve and no one has ever asked me why I want barbecue, who I’m going to serve it to and what I’m going to be saying and doing before and after I eat it. They really don’t care, I give them money, they give me food and by taking my money they relinquish all interest in what I do with the food.
If someone orders a wedding cake, the baker has lots of legitimate questions. “How big”" “How many layers?” "What flavor?. “Who’s getting married?” Is not one of those legitimate questions .
Which actually leads me to wonder about how these refusals actually work. Do they ask questions and assure themselves that it’s a straight wedding before they start taking the order? Do they tear up the order form and eject the woman from the store the first time she mentions her fiance’s name? If a man orders the cake and a different man shows up to pick up the cake do they question him before allowing him to leave with the cake or do they use their gaydar to decide whether or not to hand over the cake?
What happens if they find out after the fact that one of their cakes was used in a gay wedding? Can they repent via prayer and fasting or are they doomed to eternal hellfire and damnation? Do they have any recourse against the wicked gays that tricked them? Can they get a court order to seize the slice of cake the couple is saving in the freezer for their first anniversary? Would that redeem their sin?
I would love to find a rabidly Christain baker and pose these questions to them but I suspect, like gay-hating florists and unicorns, that they are largely mythical creatures.
That is completely, utterly disgusting.
Are you saying that public accomodations like sidewalks or public streets should NOT be available to everyone?
Considering the amount of persecution gays have suffered over the years, that’s disturbing indeed.
The whole “this violates my religious beliefs!” argument was as an excuse to discriminate against blacks was used as an excuse during desegregation, saying that God intended for races to be separate. It didn’t fly then, and it doesn’t fly this time.
Key words being “so long as it doesn’t harm others”. Discrimination does just that.
So it’s discrimination if I refuse to sell a wedding cake to a Jewish couple, that I would sell to a Christian couple, in other words? How is that different than not selling a cake to a gay couple? (I believe that was the question, not about kosher delis)
(BTW, anyone else have a craving for cake now?)
“And the icing should say ‘LESLIE AND ASHLEY’.”
“Okay, now you’re just screwing with me.”
I think so too: unicorns are pretty gay-friendly.
Not just “Chris and Pat?”
This all comes from that story somewhere in the gospels where Jesus condemned a Jewish businessman to hell for doing business with the Romans.
I’d like to clear up a couple of things regarding kosher food.
First, Jews don’t think there’s anything wrong with gentiles eating pork. There is therefore nothing wrong with restaurants that sell pork dishes, or stores that sell pork products. Jews even shop at stores that sell pork, they just stick to buying things like fresh fruit and hekshered packaged food. The commandment not to eat pork applies to Jews only, and there is no moral value to eating pork, one way or another.
Similarly, Jews understand that it wouldn’t really be in the spirit of the commandment to go around expecting goyim to make all their restaurants conform to our dietary needs.
What WOULD be a problem is if, for example, Jews were not allowed to open kosher restaurants to serve fellow Jews. But we are, and that is equality.
Moreover, the laws of kashrut are very complicated. It would not be reasonable to expect someone who isn’t Jewish to master them well enough to open a truly kosher restaurant anyway. It isn’t just a question of not serving pork. It involves a lot of other things, from soaking vegetables to make sure there are no bugs, to not cooking anything of Shabbes. Not that a restaurant could perform money transactions on Shabbes, but you get the idea-- bottles of certain kinds of wine can be opened only by Jews, the meat supplier has to be beyond reproach for the restaurant to stay in business. If they want to serve dairy dishes, they need a second kitchen, and a distinct set of dishes, and some people still won’t eat there unless meat and dairy are served at different times.
In short, I don’t think Jews would trust a kosher restaurant operated by gentiles, so it would be a pointless venture. And unnecessary, since we can open our own restaurants.
This isn’t really a good point of comparison for wedding cakes for gay marriages, since they are exactly the same as cakes for straight couples, and that is the essence of the “problem.” If there really were such a thing as a “gay cake,” as in, they all had to have seven layers in shades of the rainbow, and say “We’re here, we’re queer, and now we’re hitched!” on them, then bakers could legitimately refuse to make them, on the grounds of not wanting to end up on “Cake Wrecks.” But they don’t. As far as I know, no gay couple who has been refused service in a general bakery has wanted anything odd or flamboyant. I’m sure there are people who get cakes like that, but they know enough to go to bakers who regularly do cakes that look like Marge Simpson’s head (don’t ask).
Someone who wants a cake that looks to all intents and purposes like a “straight” cake should be able to get one at any bakery that makes those kind of cakes.
Conservatives and libertarians just love the phrase “private business” – it sings to them, it seems to encompass everything that is righteous and wonderful – total control over making money. But when is a private business really private? If a few friends trade goods and services, I guess that’s pretty private. But when you open up a storefront on a city sidewalk, ostensibly to the general public, that’s a whole lot less “private” and rightfully becomes subject to all manner of regulations because you are public-facing and public-interacting and using public resources to benefit your business venture.
And if you grow big enough to become dominant and maybe publicly owned through a stock issue, you incur even more obligations and become even less private still. The concept of “privately owned” only distinguishes from “publicly owned” and is never an absolute, but rather is a whole continuum with differing degrees of public obligation in direct proportion to how much the business affects the public interest.
The reality is that the rules we make about private businesses are ultimately a reflection of the kind of society we want to live in. And history has shown, as already said, that letting the “free market” handle discrimination results in a fundamentally discriminatory society – the kind of society no reasonable person would ever want to live in. The most insidious thing is the way that dominant businesses can actually exacerbate existing discrimination by normalizing and institutionalizing it. It leads to the kind of society exemplified by the Negro Motorist Green Book which was a sort of travel guide for blacks in the mid-twentieth century that offered tips on how to travel in America and not get lynched, and maybe even find a hotel or restaurant willing to serve you, which wasn’t easy. It was a very small book.
It wasn’t the “free market” that made inroads to fixing this problem – it was government and the rule of law. A private business is no more and no less “private” today than it was then. Only the issues have changed.
This is a silly religious belief, although it is acceptable in Great Debates as a form of witnessing.
This is an interesting admission that previous actions by conservative Christians were deliberate efforts to inflict pain or damage on homosexuals. One cannot take revenge on a person who has not inflicted harm on one, so the choice of the word revenge indicates a knowledge that the actions and behaviors directed toward homosexuals were intended to inflict harm.
You failed to answer the question. Why would anyone go through the trouble and expense of a lawsuit over a cake?
Anyway, why wasn’t the lawsuit dismissed as de minimis? What harm did the plaintiffs suffer?
After a google search, I notice that these complaints are often brought before such things as the “Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries”. Mid-level bureaucrats are making these decisions, not actual judges, which explains a lot.
That’s one of the big disadvantages of food metaphors! I could use a slice of cake and a big pulled-pork BBQ sandwich right now!
But [I think] you wouldn’t enshrine that in law, so it’s okay for me to try, even if the venture fails.
It’s a little like the trend for women to prefer to go to women gynecologists, rather than men. That is “discrimination” but it isn’t bigotry, and it isn’t something the law can possibly restrict.
Compare this to the “Christian Yellow Pages,” a directory of local businesses that only accepted advertising space from businesses whose owners declared them to be “Christian” businesses. That was restricting trade on the basis of religion, and was shot down, big time, as illegal.
(Also…I know a number of Jews who don’t care too much about dietary laws. So if someone opened a restaurant with a menu of All-Pork, All-The-Time – it wouldn’t absolutely succeed in keeping Jews out!)
I know you like to bring this out in thread like this, but only someone who hasn’t travelled in the US recently would think that the landscape today is anything like it was 60 years ago. I took a road trip a few years ago, and always got off the freeway in small towns that are basically built around refueling, fast food, and hotels. But you don’t see Clem’s Hotel for White Folks. What you see is Motel 6, Comfort Inn, Best Western, etc. You see McDonalds, KFC, etc. These national chains would be pummeled in the marketplace if they tried to discriminate the way some tried to in the 40s and 50s.
So, no, I don’t accept that if the laws were changed we’d see a resurgence of sundown towns. Those places could survive because they were insular and cut off from the outside world. With out 24 hour news cycle, the internet and the pervasiveness of national chains, those places would find it virtually impossible to survive.
I live in a town with 20,000 people. In south Georgia. I don’t think any Hasidic Jews would be comfortable. Nor a Muslim in Muslim garb. Nor a vocal Atheist nor a flamboyant Homosexual. Would it be as bad for them as it was black people in the 1960’s? No. Is it still a stifling, close minded judgmental society? Yes, it is. Not all of the USA is as progressive as you make it out to be.
So which came first? Change in law or change in custom?
And what if we revert to old laws that allow discrimination? That experiment has been tried recently: SCOTUS overturned important parts of the Voting Rights Act and some Southern states immediately instituted measures intended to discriminate racially.
HTH.
You have far more faith in your fellow man than I.
Modern communications also allows people to insulate themselves from the dissenting opinions of others.
I do not believe that institutionalized racism as we had 50 years ago would come back (we have gotten accustomed to treating the Negroes almost if they were normal people) but today there are other minority groups who would continue to be marginalized if the law allowed it.
The change, however, occurred only after the passage, publication, and enforcement of the various Civil Rights laws of the early 1960s. And while black people might not find themselves being forced out of restaurants and hotels, again, I suspect that we have not yet reached a point where Muslims would not begin to suffer the same issues if we lacked such laws. For that matter, the laws have had to be enforced against several restaurant franchises within the last dozen years, or so, indicating that the free market did not eliminate discriminatory practices even after 40 or more years of support from the law. For that matter, even with the laws in place, the Government Accounting Office continues to find failures of enforcement. This may not result in people being denied housing, but it does result in people being denied housing at a fair price.