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> The gay couple's cake is a category of _people_ being refused service.

We aren't denying service to gun users, just restricting certain kinds of content. Gun users can make videos on the evils of gun ownership just like the grabbers can, no discrimination against a category of people here!

Just like gay people can order cakes for heterosexual marriages, exactly the same as straight people can.

Just like gay people can order cakes for heterosexual marriages, exactly the same as straight people can.

If the gay couple goes in to the baker's to buy a standard cake, complete with heterosexual couple on top, I'm going to guess the dude would ask them questions to make sure they weren't buying it for themselves, either because one might have worn a dress, didn't want figurines on their cake, or were going to replace the figurine topper with one more fitting to their relationship.

A straight person wouldn't have this sort of questioning.

The baker did not refuse to service the individuals in question. He told them that he's not willing to bake a cake that, in his view, promotes homosexuality because it goes against his religious views, but he would be willing to bake them anything else or sell them anything within the shop. He was not refusing service to them, but refusing to allow that one specific 'topic'. And he also would have refused service if, for instance, a heterosexual couple wanted him to bake a cake that, in his view, promoted homosexuality. This is a regular part of his practice. For instance he also refuses to bake Halloween related goods, again believing that it goes against his faith.

Another issue that's not considered in this case is that another [gay owned] bakery, in extremely close vicinity to the 'no gay cakes' bakery, was asked to bake in the shape of a bible with a quote stating that homosexuality was a sin. They refused to do so, and this decision was upheld [locally]. That is extremely inconsistent and evidence of bias and prejudice in the local enforcement of law.

I think most people don't realize that this case is actually pending judgement from the US Supreme Court. And the implications are enormous. If they judge against him, it's going to open the door to all sorts of things, such as for instance, the behavior of online sites. It would also open the door to trolling in real life like the aforementioned 'bible cake' or even, for instance, going into an Islamic owned shop and forcing them to blaspheme. Of course if the court rules in favor of him then it's also going to open the door to discrimination in the same form as a child might tease another of, 'not touching you, not touching you!' as they hover their finger 1 cm away from a person. I'm actually somewhat surprised they chose to hear it because of this. There is no good judgement, but now they're going to have to decide one way or the other - setting national precedent.

The Bible cake story is new to me, so I had to Google it. (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/27/opinion/gay-wedding-cake....) Apparently there is a small but critical nuance between the stories. Per this article, in the Bible quote incident, the owner was willing to sell the cake, and do everything except putting a quote on it -- even offering the icing to write those words if they wanted. In the gay cake incident, the owner was willing to sell the couple anything else in the store -- but the cake itself was not allowed to be bought.

"Protected classes" are one of the few government mandated restrictions for the freedom of businesses to refuse service (something which I have some mixed feelings on, but given some of the climate that happened without these protections, I find them completely understandable). It's possible that the judgement will end up reading very narrowly -- for instance, if you use the above reasoning, it would be legal to discriminate on the messaging but illegal to discriminate on the product. (In other words, if the baker in the homosexual couple case didn't sell a homosexual marriage themed case, but would sell a generic cake and let the homosexual couple decorate it in any way they want, that would have been legal under this particular interpretation.) This is just an example, it's not the only way a narrow reading could go down, but there are probably more solutions out there then all one way vs. another.

The baker has stated in front of the supreme court that he would have been more than happy to sell them an off the-shelf-cake if that was requested, as opposed to him creating a wedding cake specifically for their wedding. One of the big problems here is that the interaction went from 0 to extremely hostile instantly. The couple asked about a wedding cake. The baker stated he does not create cakes for same sex marriages, but offered to sell them anything else or create custom goodies for a shower, birthday, or any other event. This was immediately met with expletives and rude gestures, and that was the end of their person to person interaction. That was followed by the couple presumably taking to social media the shop was bombarded with hateful calls and messages including a death threat.

It might be that the baker is lying, but this isn't even a he-said, she-said. There was not even the slightest effort made at compromise.

Interesting... customer interactions aside (the difficulty of the customer is probably irrelevant to the case), it didn't come off that way from the New York Times article, but it did in the official opinion from the Colorado Court of Appeals (https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/craig-v-masterpiece-opin...). Might not change the scope for a narrow ruling, of course, but depending on the "scope" this might affect the outcome.

It's worth noting that religion per se is not a protected class in Colorado's discrimination laws. Sexual orientation is. (https://law.justia.com/codes/colorado/2016/title-24/principa...)

Even if religion was a protected class, one problem I see here is that it really isn't "Christianity" as a whole in the Bible verse case that the owner found distasteful per se. Rather, it's the opinion expressed by the Biblical verse chosen. Christianity encompasses a wide range of opinions, after all. There are some Christians who downplay the anti-homosexual verses in the Bible (or have different interpretations to them, eg, they believe there is some degree of mis-translation). If the baker had refused to make a cake with a more universal symbol representing Christianity as a generic concept (say a cross), I think there's a stronger case that this is religious discrimination.

But as it is, it's a message. Compare this to if the reference was non-Biblical but similar in intent. Say, the customer wanted to write a message like "ALL FAGGOTS WILL BURN IN HELL" on the cake (weird message for a cake, but so is an anti-homosexual Bible verse IMHO :) ). The owner certainly has the right to refuse here because they find the message distasteful. Is there much of a difference? Whereas, in the other case, it involved a class of people that the owner found distasteful, yet was protected by the law above.

I will say that it is indeed these sort of cases that do make "protection laws" a bit troublesome... such codes force the baker to go against his or her own personal beliefs. If it's just one cake baker losing business over a moral code like this, it's probably better to err on the side of not worrying about it. The trouble is, we're well aware of the results that happened when a minority group isn't protected, and suppression of the minority group is systematic and widespread. In other words, from my vantage point, the alternative appears to be worse.

In the Colorado laws, "creed" refers primarily to religion and distinguishes between what you're referring to here with a religion at large, and a person's belief system under that religion, which is their creed. In either case, religion itself is also a protected class under federal law. Though this may be tangential. The main defense in this case is one of freedom of speech.

If you're interested in this there an immense number of really interesting filings, particularly 'friend of the court' filings on this case. You can read them all here: http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/masterpiece-cakes... They are loaded with interesting anecdotes of the implications of a ruling either way, along with precedent. For instance in one famous case an individual in New Hampshire did not want the state motto, live free or die, on their license plate which was a part of the state standardized and controlled design. The courts ruled that free speech protects the freedom to say things as much as the right to not be compelled to say things. The reason that's relevant is that no reasonable person could think that it was the individual themselves saying "live free or die" but nonetheless it was still seen as compelled speech as the individual was being forced by the state to promote a message they disagreed with.

So then the natural issue there is that the cake itself is not directly stating anything, again like your rationale on the bible cake verses. But there is court precedent declaring everything from photographs to engravings to stained glass windows to... topless dancing as protected speech under the first amendment. It seems likely that wedding cakes would follow in the same vein. When people spend hundreds of dollars on these cakes, they're implicitly spending most of their money not on the cake, but on the artistic expression of its creator.

> That is extremely inconsistent and evidence of bias and prejudice in the local enforcement of law.

That is not inconsistent, as one is denying someone based on what they are, and the other is denying someone based on harassment. The gay couple didn't ask the baker to write on the cake that heterosexuality was immoral. There's an obvious difference between affirming the culture of the customer, and antagonistically denying the culture of the producer.

And I do think think that the baker's refusal was about what they are, since the conditions to bake the cake required that it didn't acknowledge what they are. It's like saying, "I will bake a cake for a black person, but only if it doesn't reference black culture in any way."

The religious baker was being asked to engage in an action that's deeply disparaging of his beliefs and values.

The gay baker was being asked to engage in an action that's deeply disparaging of his beliefs and values.

This is the problem with social laws. It's easy to see things from our own perspectives, without considering that what 'we' consider perfectly reasonable can be perfectly offensive to another individual. One of the most crucial issues in forcing people to engage in behavior that they find offensive is that it goes both ways.

I believe the standard retort to this is that religion is a choice, whereas sexual orientation is not.

Which is understandable as far as it goes, except it is the sole exception to the accepted blank slate belief of sociologists everywhere. We carve out a very visible exception in this domain.

Zeitgeist: Our behaviors are all socialized into us, with the sole exception of sexual orientation. Contrast with the perspective that one's religion is merely a choice, such that after being socialized into a belief system for one's most formative eighteen years, one can simply toss it away thereafter.

Absolutely, but the issue here is that religion is a protected class under the law. The key point here is that a 'creator' generally cannot be forced to use their talents to create something that they do not want to. However can people 'override' this and force people to create things they normally would not, if the thing being requested falls under the domain of a protected class? For instance 'satanists' are now requesting the same baker create cakes celebrating the birth of Lucifer with upside down crosses and associated imagery, arguing that it's an expression of their religion, implicitly with threats to sue if the baker doesn't abide.

> The gay couple's cake is a category of _people_ being refused service. The gun assembly video is a category of _topic_ being censored.

So should it be OK for a bakery to refuse to bake wedding cakes for gay couples, as long as it's willing to bake other kinds of products for gay people? In other words, it's refusing only to provide service to the specific topic of gay marriage, not gay people generally; gay people can still use the rest of the bakery's services, just not services involving gay weddings specifically.

E.g., a gay person can order a cake for another straight person's wedding, or can order any other product. As a thought experiment, this should suffice to categorize the bakery's action as a "topic" being refused service (gay marriage) rather than category of people.

I have to agree with the original comment that it does seem spurious that companies in some cases are allowed to choose their customers, and are not in others. I understand that laws have been passed to create these distinctions, but I don't see a solid ethical foundation underlying which distinctions should to be protected or not.

At some point it feels to me like the services offered by these companies will become so integral to the fabric of society that they'll become "public goods" of a sort. Would we tolerate it if the phone company refused service to gun's rights advocates, or if airlines or bus companies refused them transportation? In legal fact, perhaps they could, but in reality they do not - however, Internet firms like Google and Facebook ban large swaths of content off their platforms.

As the Internet becomes vital to our lives and interpersonal communication, it's beginning to feel unfair that private companies have such tremendous and capricious control over these pseudo-public spaces.

> Would we tolerate it if the phone company refused service to gun's rights advocates, or if airlines or bus companies refused them transportation? In legal fact, perhaps they could, but in reality they do not - however, Internet firms like Google and Facebook ban large swaths of content off their platforms.

That's an interesting question, and it's not hypothetical(assuming you consider financial services as part of your "public goods" argument) - https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-cuomo-directs-depa...

Not a lawyer. I’m guess I’m just really confused because I’m reading all of these comments and still not seeing a distinction.

YouTube can ban all homosexual videos from its platform so long as it doesn’t ban unrelated videos from homosexual people? That doesn’t sound right to me but it’s what I’m interpreting from your post.

Further are you saying the baker could refuse to sell them the cake they wanted because it had some gay theme ( two girl names I think) so long as they offered to sell them a Superman cake at the same time?

> YouTube can ban all homosexual videos from its platform so long as it doesn’t ban unrelated videos from homosexual people?

Yes (at least in states where sexual orientation is a protected class).

> Further are you saying the baker could refuse to sell them the cake they wanted because it had some gay theme ( two girl names I think) so long as they offered to sell them a Superman cake at the same time?

AFAIK this is not a settled issue.

I imagine a reasonable test might boil down to "If you have a policy that you never put names on cakes then you can refuse to write 'Jane and Jill'. But if you will write 'Jack and Jill' when asked, then you also need to write 'Jane and Jill' when asked."

In other words, the store may not have a policy that is functionally indistinguishable from refusing service to a protected class.

Notice that Google banning videos about homosexuality would definitely not be equivalent to banning homosexuals from using its public service.

This gets hairy; e.g., religion is a protected class. Could a Satanist cult compel a cake-making business owner to write down a disavowal of his God (in frosting)? Evaluating hairy edge-cases on a case-by-case basis are why human judges exist.

IANAL.

Every time I see that IANAL acronym, it's like this: iMac, iOS, iPhone, iAnal

TMI?