Tiberius Decimus Maximus said:
Parakeets? Or Mosques?
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Parakeets? Or Mosques?
Frankish Sinatra
Sergeant Knight
I agree. That's why I make an exception here.Austupaio said:
Against the people who would continue to deny them their rights. Yes.Austupaio said:
I don't care how much ammo bigots have so long as they can't use it to get their way.Austupaio said:
Can someone explain to me why it is "discrimination" for a church or a cleric to say "Nope, I cannot marry you to your parakeet . . . or you gay boyfriend."
I just do not see the "discrimination" here.
If it were: well, you are a perfectly qualified candidate for this job/post/student-slot, etc., but you are a gay parakeet, and we hate those chatty minges . . . so **** you! No job/school/scholarship/etc. for you! THAT sounds like discrimination to me.
But if I start a business and decide I'm ONLY going to serve folks whose names begin in D and end in R (because I've had good luck with those clients) then who is to say that is "discrimination."
Seems like we need a nice concise definition of "discrimination."
ADDIT: and just a point of note, I've got nothing against gay folks. I wish them all the luck. But I don't understand why they should expect to be accepted by everyone in the society automatically simply because the SC has said that gay love is legal at the Federal level (a decision I fully agree with). Seems to me, forcing someone to perform a "religious" ceremony that breaches their religious beliefs is at least as much an infringement as their initial refusal to perform it no?
The secular Justice of the Peace will make no bones about performing the ceremony right? So it is not like there are not options that actually fit with the gay worldview a bit better than getting married at a right-wing Christian church?
I just do not see the "discrimination" here.
If it were: well, you are a perfectly qualified candidate for this job/post/student-slot, etc., but you are a gay parakeet, and we hate those chatty minges . . . so **** you! No job/school/scholarship/etc. for you! THAT sounds like discrimination to me.
But if I start a business and decide I'm ONLY going to serve folks whose names begin in D and end in R (because I've had good luck with those clients) then who is to say that is "discrimination."
Seems like we need a nice concise definition of "discrimination."
ADDIT: and just a point of note, I've got nothing against gay folks. I wish them all the luck. But I don't understand why they should expect to be accepted by everyone in the society automatically simply because the SC has said that gay love is legal at the Federal level (a decision I fully agree with). Seems to me, forcing someone to perform a "religious" ceremony that breaches their religious beliefs is at least as much an infringement as their initial refusal to perform it no?
The secular Justice of the Peace will make no bones about performing the ceremony right? So it is not like there are not options that actually fit with the gay worldview a bit better than getting married at a right-wing Christian church?
Austupaio
Duke
That's why this is bull****. The baker did not deny them their right. It is their right to purchase a cake, but not to purchase a cake from a specific person. The baker refused them service while service remained available from hundreds of local sources.Frankish Sinatra said:
Well, buddy, if you weren't being so short-sighted you would see that this has plenty of potential to help them get their way because it scares people, people like Mike Huckabee and his constituents. It even scares me, it hit close to home because my mother-in-law is a Mormon who operates a little bakery 'business' from her home. $135,000 is more than their house is worth.Frankish Sinatra said:
And peoples can say that all white should be killed and not allowing white to attend an event and still get out without any punishment.Austupaio said:
Hell even get TON of support from peoples including money because of their ''fight'' against the ''evil straight white male''.
Double standard sicken me.
Frankish Sinatra said:
Because the punishment was blatantly disproportionate to the "crime". It was like expropriating your car because you parked at a wrong place. The ruling should have been something like - issue an apology, bake the stupid cake and give the dykes a grand so that you remember the lesson.
Whether or not gay marriage was legal in Oregon at that time is kinda irrelevant. They wanted a cake, not to have them perform the ceremony. Unless the couple wanted the cake to have two marzipan vaginas on top or something that might be in breach of common decency, the bakery had no ground to refuse service. But 135k in emotional damages. Come on. If not getting a cake propels you to soul-torturing episodes where you think you don't deserve love or God hates you or some ****, you have WAY bigger things to worry about than a baker's opinion on gay marriage.
You didn't know?kurczak said:
Homophobia is one of the vilest of crime.
Up top right next to rape and genocide.
I had someone tell me that homophobia make someone irredeemable.
So they can have a huge charity going, work their ass off to help their community but if they make a single comment against gay they have crossed the moral event horizon and become irredeemable.
Austupaio
Duke
I can't think of a joke based off of that heinous enough to even result in a warning. 
I've got a couple questions based on what some of you had said and kurczak's second edit.
First, what was the baker supposed to, and second, what is the baker supposed to do now after being financially wrecked, not mention 'emotionally damaged' herself..?
In the first instance, okay, sure their cake was pretty tame and just featured two female figures. For the sake of discussion, let's assume the baker is deeply, deeply religious and truly finds this practice evil and thinks that condoning it would damn herself to hell, not just the couple. Is she supposed to just toss aside her closely-held life-long beliefs, make this evil cake and meet all of the couple's demands with a smile? She is legally obligated to do this simply because she sells cakes to her neighbors?
In the second instance, what about now? Say she keeps baking to try to not go completely homeless from the award, what if the couple wants another cake? Can she refuse them, or would that still be discrimination? What if all of the plaintiff lesbian couple's friends start ordering cakes too? She just has to deal with all of this?
If you say yes to all of that and still don't understand why I brought up indentured servitude, I don't know really know how to respond.
I've got a couple questions based on what some of you had said and kurczak's second edit.
First, what was the baker supposed to, and second, what is the baker supposed to do now after being financially wrecked, not mention 'emotionally damaged' herself..?
In the first instance, okay, sure their cake was pretty tame and just featured two female figures. For the sake of discussion, let's assume the baker is deeply, deeply religious and truly finds this practice evil and thinks that condoning it would damn herself to hell, not just the couple. Is she supposed to just toss aside her closely-held life-long beliefs, make this evil cake and meet all of the couple's demands with a smile? She is legally obligated to do this simply because she sells cakes to her neighbors?
In the second instance, what about now? Say she keeps baking to try to not go completely homeless from the award, what if the couple wants another cake? Can she refuse them, or would that still be discrimination? What if all of the plaintiff lesbian couple's friends start ordering cakes too? She just has to deal with all of this?
If you say yes to all of that and still don't understand why I brought up indentured servitude, I don't know really know how to respond.
RabbleKnight said:
You know, I kind of get that kind of thinking from common people. I don't agree with it, but I get it. It's a Newtonian thing, a group has been discriminated against or even outright oppressed for a long time, so they become "unreasonably" touchy about some stuff for a while. It happened with all things racial, it's all things gay.
But a judge should know better than ruling on emotional grounds.
Yeah that sucks. I thought there was some fundraiser going on that managed to raise the 135k. This obviously doesn't make the ruling ok, but it is a practical solution here and now.
If you're asking about what exactly the legal situation is, then I don't know. I can make an educated guess, but I don't know US/Oregon law well enough to be sure (don't know anything about Oregon law at all...who does? Are there even lawyers in Oregon anymore? I thought they all grew a beard and started a micro brewery)
If you're asking me what the situation should be in my ideal world, then yeah I think she should be obligated to take any orders that don't break common decency/hate speech etc.
It all depends on your concept of entrepreneurship - I'm not totally on board with the "it's my business/property therefore I make all the rules" view. I don't think anyone actually is. There's a number of areas where the powers that be interfere with what you do in your bakery. You have to abide by hygiene norms, labor laws, if you went corporate then the entire concept of a corporation is a legal fiction that only exists because the government says it exists. Even the building you run your business in had to be built according to some kind of regulation. And I don't think there's anything wrong with it. Some things are bigger than private property.
The point is, when you run a business, you are still operating within a world. You're still part of it. It doesn't make you an absolute king in your world. By getting a license to run a business you are effectively agreeing to offer your services to the general public. You are in advance agreeing to enter into contract with anyone who agrees to your terms and conditions. (This is where it gets different from for example selling your house, which is a one time thing. You're not running a business here and in my "ideal" world, would be free to discriminate against people for all kinds of bigot things)
Now you may say - ok, part of my T&C is that you are straight. Check mate. The T&C should be relevant to the goods or services you provide - you are obviously free to set a price, delivery conditions, quality paramaters etc. And if someone disagrees with those, you can justifiably tell them to get their cake someplace else. Then there are things like "no shirt no service" or generally breaches of common decency. The key word being "common". It is something that the society as a collective agrees are weird. It may be not wearing a shirt in one country or wearing purple nail polish in another. Allowing the provider to refuse service on those grounds is not there to protect the emotions or feelings of the provider. It is there to protect his business and the general public so that they might get service in a reasonably inoffensive environement. People might very well choose not to go to a restaurant that is forced to service people who are covered in **** and bark like a rabid dog the whole time.
Being gay is not a breach of common decency in the US. And it wasn't even when gay marriage was still "illegal" in Oregon. Although it wasn't really illegal. Illegal is when something is explicitly prohibited and punished. Gay marriage was just not recognized by law to have any legal consequences.
Again, the key word is common. It should not be possible to argue that well, your business is mostly frequented by KKK members so it's ok not to serve blacks because it would offend your customers. It's about enforcing some sort of common morals and social conventions. Not the morality or conventions of individual customers and certainly not the morality of the service provider.
Considering what I wrote above - yeah, she has to deal with it. Her opinion on gay marriage is her problem. I have to deal with all kinds of people I actively despise for reasons much better than their sexual orientation every day
Austupaio
Duke
Expecting professionalism from an American judge? Now that's a level of naivete that I know you're quite above.
As for legalism surrounding running a business, absolutely that should all exist. Building code, health code, all of that equates to public safety and equality*. I just don't believe that choosing your customers equates to that. I also find that this distinction between allowed discrimination and disallowed discrimination is incredibly vague and 'feels' based. As a security guard am I allowed to decline work at a gay bar? There's nothing beyond common decency about a bar, just about everyone on this planet goes to bars, but if I personally have issues working at a bar specifically targeted at homosexual men... I just have to do it anyway? Not even because I'm already being paid to it, but because I'm just obligated to do so?
"Being gay is not a breach of common decency in the US." There are, obviously, many, many people who disagree with you. Even the federalization of it was a single vote off. Even if it wasn't, where is common decency defined? No where, it's just people's feels again. Law shouldn't be based upon feels.
Everything else you said makes sense, so I appreciate the response, it gave me some food for thought. I just have a lot of trouble digesting the idea that just because you offer a service, you're obligated to provide that service to anyone. Nor can I get over the obvious double-standard, that if the tables were reversed and a gay baker refused to bake a cake for a fundamentalist, this would never have even gone to court.
P.S. It makes one wonder, is it just peachy that I might say, "I'm happy being open-minded and non-bigoted" not because I know it's right, but because I'm fearful of persecution?
Edit; also this is ridiculous, I'm defending religious fundamentalism, I've been on this forum like six years and I don't think I've ever done that in any sort of debate.
Politico Magazine: Michael Lind, "How the South Skews America: We’d be less violent, more mobile and in general more normal if not for Dixie." (03/07/2015)
The comment section wars are glorious.
As for the article itself, I find myself agreeing with the author on some points, but vehemently disagreeing about some of his premises. I feel he overemphasises "Southern violence", while utterly neglecting violence in the North. At the same time, the view of Americans as gun totin', bible thumpin' idiots that has gained credence throughout much of the West (that isn't the United States) in the last few decades is one that largely corresponds with the (Northern view of the) Southerner.
The comment section wars are glorious.
As for the article itself, I find myself agreeing with the author on some points, but vehemently disagreeing about some of his premises. I feel he overemphasises "Southern violence", while utterly neglecting violence in the North. At the same time, the view of Americans as gun totin', bible thumpin' idiots that has gained credence throughout much of the West (that isn't the United States) in the last few decades is one that largely corresponds with the (Northern view of the) Southerner.
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