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No one was asking the baker to engage in gay sex, just to make a cake.
Not true. What if the demand was to put Lance and Stephen on top of the cake? The business owner could and would have sold them an unthemed cake and the "couple" could have installed the the miniature figures atop the cake.
Does an artist have to paint a picture of two gay men kissing? I thought not.
This bizarre legal scharade is over!
Unless it is discrimination.
We have anti discrimination laws prohibiting discriminating based on race, religion, gender and sexual orientation.
Would he have made the same cake for a heterosexual couple?
You still don't get it do you? We're not talking about selling groceries or movie tickets. You want to force an artist to paint a picture of gays in action. That's unconstitutional.
This case isn't about whether anti-discrimination statutes are enforceable. Clearly they are. If you open a business to the public, you cannot lawfully discriminate against people of color or women (for example), even if your religious beliefs compel you.
The thornier question is whether some forms of businesses, like baking wedding cakes or floral arrangements, need an exception from anti-discrimination statutes because they are "artistic expressions" as much as they are selling commodities. I'm not really sure where you draw the line on what's an artistic expression and what isn't. A wedding cake? Sometimes a cake is just a cake, in my opinion.
Or a wedding photographer cannot be coerced into participating in a homosexual wedding.
It is a cake. Making cakes is not against his religious beliefs. Cakes are food, and as such, they fall under the public accommodations clause of the Civil Rights act.
Yup. If I practice a religion called TEPLimeyism and one of the basic tenets of TEPLimeyism is that people of African descent are the spawn of Satan who must die, does that mean I can open a lunch counter an deny them service on religious grounds? Is the answer different if I'm a really staunch believer or just a "Sundays only" type of guy?
Your freedom of religion affords you the right to practice religion, but not in a place of public accommodation in a manner that violates faith-neutral law. The baker has his remedies. He can not run a place of public accommodation. He can run a bakery that does not bake any wedding cakes. He can run a place of public accommodation that does not need anyone to distinguish between LGBT and straight. But what he can't do is run a place of public accommodation and then discriminate against a protected class on the basis of his religious beliefs, feigned or real.
You still don't get it do you? We're not talking about selling groceries or movie tickets. You want to force an artist to paint a picture of gays in action. That's unconstitutional.
We are talking about making a cake. A baker baking a cake and selling it.
Get a grip.
Or a wedding photographer cannot be coerced into participating in a homosexual wedding.
Or a Muslim architect cannot be coerced into building out a house own by a Jewish family. Go find another architect if you can.
Or a Catholic doctor cannot be coerced into performing surgery on an atheist. Let him/her die.
Or a TEPLimeyist chef cannot be coerced into cooking for a Latin American couple. Let them go find another restaurant.
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