In Progressive-occupied Colorado, it is the official policy of the state that gays have more rights than other people.
Last week, the Colorado Civil Rights Division ruled that Denver’s Azucar Bakery did not discriminate against William Jack, a Christian from Castle Rock, by refusing to make two cakes with anti-gay messages and imagery that he requested last year.
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Last year, the Colorado Civil Rights Division ruled that another bakery, Masterpiece Cake Shop in Lakewood, could not refuse to make a wedding cake for a gay couple, calling it discriminatory.
One set of rules for the politically favored, a different set of rules for everybody else. That’s America under the Obamacrats.
Note: According to a liberal polling outfit, only 32% of Americans support punishing people for refusing to take part in gay weddings. Unfortunately, those 32% control the media, academia, the courts, and the government.
Revolt.
It’s time something real and permanent changed.
Discretion: attention, foresight, maturity, prudence, responsibility, wisdom, consideration, discernment, judiciousness, thoughtfulness, wariness, presence of mind.
Tolerance: Patience, resistance, toughness, stamina, steadfastness, sufferance, vigor, staying power.
A man walks into your bakery and order a cake that says: “F*uck all you conservative Christians and the mules you bugger.”
This cake will go out of your bakery in a box with your name and address on it.
How do you want to approach this order? With sweeping “tolerance” or with discretion? All you have riding on your decision is how the harpies will react in an effort to punish you if you disagree with their ideological crusade.
The Gaystapo reaction to Chick-Fil-A set my tolerance for some aspects of the “Gay Agenda” back a bunch of years. If the Gaystapo wants to make chicken an icon of homophobia, it is fine by me. If the Gaystapo wants to try to dent the success of Chick-Fil-A by boycotting, fine by me. But please be tolerant and understand that I think the Gaystapo is acting like Chicken Little and I am here to tell them and all their James Edward ilk that the friggin’ sky is not falling.
As Terence noted ages ago, corruptisima re publica plurimae leges. (In the most corrupt state are the most laws.) All laws are possible to make, but not all laws are possible to enforce. If you seek to force people to respect you by law, expect to be demeaned and laughed at. The Romans scoffed at foolish laws, calling them ab asino lanain which means trying to get wool from an ass.
The situations are not analogous. A better analogy to “refusing to make two cakes with anti-gay messages and imagery” would be refusing to make two cakes with anti-Christian messages and imagery.
Both of those are legal. That’s equal treatment under the law.
Letting anyone to refuse to make any cake they didn’t want to make… that’s FREEDOM!
It’s amazing that the 32% minority can trump the 68% majority. The Founding Fathers wrote into the Constitution protections for the minority to prevent tyranny from the majority. How can we overcome the tyranny by the minority? What has happened to the maxim; majority rules?
Spin away RTM.
Case one: I want a cake that supports my beliefs.
“They are against mine, I’m not baking it.”
Case two: I want a cake that supports my beliefs.
“They are against mine, I’m not baking it.”
Quick, what’s the difference?
Ahem, rtm @ #3 –
Horsefeathers. The law does not require “equal treatment” of all and from all in the private sector. You can’t force a blacksmith to fit your goldfish with shoes. You can’t force a blacksmith to fit your horse with shoes if its hooves are shot. What you can insist upon is the equal protections under the law and the equal application of the laws.
All this equality on demand according to the standards of the “victim” is a juvenile concept dreamed up by the spoiled children of privilege.
In your world, “discrimination” in a heinous act. You would never, ever be caught making choices about mixing patterns on the basis of discretion, would you. It would be pattern discrimination to do so.
Livewire, the bakery is not being prosecuted because it refused to bake a cake that expressed something against the owner’s beliefs. That may have been the baker’s motive, but it is not in and of itself illegal. The bakery is being charged because it refused service based on the customers’ sexual orientation — which IS illegal, just as if it had been based on the customers’ nationality, race, religion, or gender.
I would be interested in seeing the Supreme Court ruling that elevated “sexual orientation” to court standing as part of the nationality, race, religion triad. Citizens have no protection against discrimination by other citizens except under specific federal law naming and defining the discrimination.
The 14th Amendment protects citizens from actions by the national, state or local government which would “abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Pedophilia is a sexual orientation in which an adult desires sexual attraction to pre pubescent children. Necrophilia is a sexual orientation in which sex with corpses is the goal. Bestiality is a sexual orientation involving sexual activity between human and non-human animals. None of these are specifically protected by the Constitution or aspects of federal Civil Rights law.
I am further attracted to the inclusion of “gender” as part of the civil rights triad.
42 U.S.C. §1981, the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 are all federal laws that protect you from discrimination based on race, national origin, color, and ethnicity. Title VII forbids discrimination with respect to any aspect of employment, including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, layoff, training, fringe benefits, and any other “term or condition of employment.”
Federal law prohibits public accommodations from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. If you think that you have been discriminated against in using such a facility, you may file a complaint with the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, or with the United States attorney in your area. You may also file suit in the U.S. district court.
“Public accommodations” are privately-owned/operated facilities and services that offer certain goods and services to the general public such as food, lodging, gasoline, entertainment, etc.
A bakery that sells cakes to the general public, likely can NOT pick and choose who may buy the cake. But that bakery is not required by any law to create a Kosher kitchen in order to bake a kosher cake. Nor is a restaurant required to provide halal meat. Have you seen a halal McDonalds’s?
To force a baker to form a specific cake that meets the requirements of the buyer is well beyond the scope of any existing civil rights law. But, it may be coming to a sloppy legislature near you.
LGBTXYZ is a gender-bending chop shop. How can anyone think of adding “gender” to the protected triad? A small portion of the human species is same gender attracted and an even much smaller number of humans are gender identity confused/complex.
Society debates complex issues in terms of how a given change improves or damages the morality, ethics, interaction of and within the “public square.”
The concept of democracy embodies the concepts of liberty and equality. That means we are immediately “truncating” liberty, equality and democracy in general by establishing a government which regulates us. This is where libertarians get whacky. True democracy can’t have true equality and winners and losers all at the same time. It is an ideal toward which we strive by keeping the restrictions on freedom as pure and simple as possible. The Marxist daydream of the government withering away while we all perform acts of perfect harmony has never come close to existing and never will.
Now we are confronting this great societal values conflict of whether a lousy, two-bit baker can refuse to create a cake specifically for a gay wedding and base that refusal on a religious belief system.
From my perspective, the gay couple did not want a cake they wanted a pissing contest over “values.” Since rtm @ #8 has so misrepresented what civil rights law is all about, it is fairly clear that rtm is deeply opposed to the collective moral memory at work in the public square and wishes to alter and abolish it based on individual cases of “secular reasoning.”
Up in poor old, confused Canada Justice Kenneth Makenzie wrote for the Court of Appeal for British Columbia created some world class doublespeak: “religion and morality are not synonymous terms. (M)oral positions (whether secularly or religiously based) taken as positions of conscience are entitled to full participation in the dialogue in the public square where moral questions are answered as a matter of law and social policy. There is no bright line between a religious and a non-religious conscience. … Moral positions must be accorded equal access to the public square without regard to religious influence. A religiously informed conscience should not be accorded any privilege, but neither should it be placed under a disability. … The meaning of strictly secular is thus pluralist or inclusive in its widest sense.”
When you have parsed the meaning in that salmagundi of psychobabble and successfully explained it to me and others in the public square, I will be better prepared to discuss liberty and equality on demand in all instances of interaction both inside our homes and in the public square.
Until then, get a life.
Thank you for shredding the Chrtistophobe more thoroughly than I ever could.
Happy Easter!
Wow, Heliotrope, for all its length that did nothing to refute what I wrote.
The fact that you’re asking this misses the point. Of course McDonald’s doesn’t need to provide halal meat — but if it did, it could not discriminate in who it provided it to in violation of the Civil Rights Act. Similarly, if a company provides a service (such as wedding cakes), then it cannot discriminate based on any of the categories covered by civil rights law.
Yes, rtm, because of the exception granted by the 1st Amendment. As the bakery is not required to meet religious demands, so is it not required to ignore its own religious beliefs.
There is no evidence in all of this back and forth that the pizza restaurant or the bakery or the florist refused to make a transaction with a gay, because the person was gay. What was refused was to provide a service that conflicted with a personally held religious belief. In each case, that was a gay wedding.
You decided all on your own that “gender” and “sexual orientation” are protected statuses under some law you failed to identify. Neither “gender” nor “sexual orientation” is a protected civil rights class. Nice try, but no cigar.
Please come back with legal evidence of your claims. Gays can marry in some states. They can not require a church perform the wedding. We are now engaged in whether a restaurant, for instance, must cater a gay wedding if the religious beliefs of the owners would be challenged by doing so.
Gays need to find enough tolerance to accept the religious beliefs they may find personally offensive. No cake baker has turned up yet who took the order and then left the wedding couple without a cake. That is a clear violation of a contract. But not to accept a contract is by and large something entirely different.
Secularists see sexual orientation as no choice and adhering to religious beliefs as stupid and therefore an obvious “choice” to be obstinate. There is little if anything that we who have religious faith can do to bridge the gap between themselves and a secularist’s dismissive air of superiority over the voodoo of stupid religion.
The further hilarity, Heliotrope, as was pointed out on Twitter today: sexual orientation is biologically determined and cannot be changed, but gender is fluid and can change repeatedly throughout a lifetime.
Through the looking-glass, indeed.
NDT,
People who “reason” obstinately by making up the rules as they go are exposing themselves more and more often on social media. Since they are opinionated and believe themselves to be of soaring intellect, so, also do they believe their opponents are opinionated and of failing intellect.
Then they resort to the loud microphone tactic of repeating their jabber faster and more forcefully.
I am not certain that one can ever actually penetrate their minds of absolute certainty, but at least others can see the target practice and assess the ricochets to see if any chips are flying.
Being a person who is a citizen of the United States earns the protections of the law and the due process of the laws under the Constitution. A citizen who is LGBT gets those civil rights as a person, not as a LGBT entity.
However, many LGBT people looked at Affirmative Action that was heaped so abundantly on “black” people and they decided they should get some of that action for themselves. They began by insisting that the sexual acts of homosexuality are protected civil rights. That means that a lifestyle, not a person is protected under the Constitution.
So, naturally NAMBLA stepped forward and said “Us too.” So then the gay lifestyle as a protected civil rights crowd wrote up their form of Godwin’s Law making it intolerant to conflate their lifestyle with plural marriage, pedophilia, servicing yourself with a goat, etc.
They went after Reagan because he didn’t make it OK to spread AIDS in the barebacking lifestyle world. In essence, they adopted the a version of Flip Wilson’s Geraldine by blaming Reagan with the spread of AIDS in a “Reagan made us do it” defense.
Scientology got church status with the IRS. Church Street in the Castro district in Eureka Valley in San Francisco has all the stars in alignment for the Eureka Church of Castro in the Gay Valley. It could have the most amazing doxology, great street fairs, a wonderful men’s chorus, jazzy dancing and resplendent robes and extravagant rituals. But, most importantly, it could perform weddings and franchise chapels throughout the land.
Many gays in fly-over country would like something more sedate, so Eureka Church of Castro in the Gay Valley could farm their services out to rented venues and offer a variety of marriage ceremony selections tailored to suit the tastes of the players paying the bill.
But, that is not what the noisy gays want. They want the law to make people respect them in every way that upsets their self-esteem. They want the wizard to give them a medal.