Religious liberty and hatred

[Bob Butler 54]

(07-02-2016, 11:04 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Laws against discrimination in public accommodations and in housing have withstood Constitutional challenges.  Licensed professions can remove people for discriminatory behavior. So I own a bakery shop. What sort of cake can I reasonably refuse to make? Obviously anything that violates copyright or trademark laws. If someone asks me to create a party cake that has Mickey Mouse on it  and I do not have the rights to put those Disney characters on a cake that I sell, then I had better say NO very quickly to the request.

If I were asked to make a slanderous or libelous statement as a message on the cake (let us say "XXXX is a pedophile"), then I had better not make that cake.

Something utterly distasteful, as mockery of human suffering? It might be perfectly legal to create a cake with a depiction of the gate of a Nazi concentration, labor, or extermination camp and change "ARBEIT MACHT FREI" to "IT NEVER HAPPENED" on a birthday cake for Holocaust denier David Irving, which would likely get protests from Jewish organizations.  I have no duty to do something that would hurt my business. Pornographic, seditious, blasphemous, racist, or extremist material might have the protection of the First Amendment, but I have no duty to create or transmit it. An insulting message like "DIE IN A FIRE!" would offend anyone who knew that I was in the business.

You have me imagining a skit from the old Carol Brunette Show.  Picture Tim Conway entering a bake shop set wearing a black Gestappo style severe military uniform, but the trim has been altered to show frosting style bakery decorations such as flowers and scolloped lines in pink and baby blue.  The badge would say something like "Frosting Police!"  In lots of ways, the politicization of cakes is that silly.

But I'm not sure you've got all the lines drawn in the right place.  Can a bakery refuse to sell a cake with a white bride wax figure on the top, along side a black groom?  Is this inherently different than two brides or two grooms?  Is there a compromise where the baker can refuse to put two deemed offensive figures by her perhaps bigoted standard on the cake, so long as she offers to sell figures separately?

I sympathize highly with the Awakening's lines of legal precedent.  If you are providing service to the public, you can't refuse to provide service due to racial bigotry.  We are now dealing with a different sort of bigotry.  In principle, according to law and precedent, the same lines ought to be applied in the same way.  Alas, being consistent often results in silliness, silliness unless you are the one who is the target of bigotry, silly if it isn't your happy event that is being ruined by a narrow mined judgmental (expletive deleted.)