Colorado baker told to bake that cake

Admitting nothing of the sort.

YOU CAN ALWAYS DO SOMETHING ELSE FOR A LIVING.

It compels BUSINESSES, not people.


No, not really, but libertarian children are simple thinkers.



Nobody is forcing him to bake a cake. He can close down his business if he doesn't want to bake cakes. But once he said, "I bake cakes", he has to actually, you know, bake the cake like he said he would.

You see, if we want to live in Mad Max world, we could have the government not enforce the law. So homophobic baker can refuse to bake a cake, and gay couple can come back with their friends and burn his place to the ground. See how that works?

Oh, wait, no, you want the government to stay out of the public accommodation but totally protect property rights.

See, this is why I don't take "libertarians" seriously, they are bought and paid for by the privileged to protect privilege.
JOE ...YOU COULD GET $10,000 FOR A LIVING! Rip off a nasty old conservative!!! Guy, what are you waiting for?

Wait ... I think I know ... you're holding out for more!!!! Okay, I can probably scrape up another $2500. So, $12, 500 ... just find three liberals that I can trust ... I'll help you there .. and they decide which of us is lying ... and the liar loses $12,500!!!

Help Joe out here, everyone! Urge Joe to accept the money!
 
Weird stalkers knowing where I live?

I mean, shit, if you get this bent out of shape because I called you a liar, I hate to think what you'd do if you knew where I lived. You'd probably go all Glenn Close on me.


Nah, that's a really feeble excuse, you little coward. You can deliver your money to the lawyer via an intermediary. No one has to know where you live. (Not to mention that 'stalking' and 'doxxing' is what Leftist scum do.) Easy-peasy guy. All I want is your money.

But anyone reading this knows by now why you won't accept my challenge. It's screamingly obvious. It would take me fifteen minutes to dig up the documents proving I am what I say I am. And you'd lose your money.

Cowards like Joe love the internet. They can say any filthy nasty thing about anyone they want, secure in the knowledge that they face no consequences. It's just little Joe's misfortune that I can easily prove I did what I said I did. So he's stuck. It'll be interesting to watch little Joe, day after day, week after week, twisting and turning and ducking and dodging ... trying to explain why he wont' take up my challenge. Just a coward and liar.
 
It doesn't. Ensuring that people bake them cakes, or provide them with any other services against their will, does however.

I'm a libertarian. I don't consider that right wing, though you might. Regardless, my argument is that these laws violate fundamental rights of self-determination, freedom of association and freedom of speech. In general, I don't think government should have the power to engage in this kind of social engineering.
The problem is when I was a kid people in my little town would not sell minorities houses. I remember when I was about 9 (not really, hell I don't know how old I am right now, but I was really short) adults talking about blacks ruining property values. So, if a baker can not sell gay people a cake then realtors can refuse to sell black people houses, or gas stations would not pump black people gas when they drive through, or breakfast at the local diner. Do you see what you guys are saying? If you have the majority you can literally control people in your area.
 
JOE ...YOU COULD GET $10,000 FOR A LIVING! Rip off a nasty old conservative!!! Guy, what are you waiting for?

Wait ... I think I know ... you're holding out for more!!!! Okay, I can probably scrape up another $2500. So, $12, 500 ... just find three liberals that I can trust ... I'll help you there .. and they decide which of us is lying ... and the liar loses $12,500!!!

Help Joe out here, everyone! Urge Joe to accept the money!

Doug, some years ago there was a talk radio duo in Los Angeles doing the Ken and Bob Show.
When the Leftist mouthed off about how smart the Left is, I called and offered to pay for IQ tests for both of us.
If he won, I would pay him $10,000 but if he lost, he would pay me $10,000.
Ken Minyard and Bob Arthur. Can't recall which was Lefty but he passed on the wager.
I did the same thing to Fat Boy on a television show and he wouldn't take the test either.
It is fun to have fun but you have to know how. - The Cat in the Hat
 
Admitting nothing of the sort.

YOU CAN ALWAYS DO SOMETHING ELSE FOR A LIVING.

It compels BUSINESSES, not people.
LOL - of course, of course. Man, you're gonna throw your hip out dancing around like that!
 
The problem is when I was a kid people in my little town would not sell minorities houses.
Racism is a scourge. I just don't think government is the right tool for solving those kinds of problems. In the case of racism, particularly racism against blacks in the wake of slavery, it was and is hard to argue against laws banning it. But the principle was never sound, and now that it's being applied to more and more issues, the idea that government should be banning unpopular biases starts to get Orwellian. We indulged some overreach in the past because slavery left a gaping wound in the nation. But we need to dial it back. Government isn't there to maintain groupthink.
If you have the majority you can literally control people in your area.
Not as long as we maintain Constitutionally limits on government power. The majority doesn't get to just "control" the minority.

Even if racists were in the majority in a locality, minorities wouldn't be controlled. As long as we keep government clean of bias, minorities are free to do as they wish. Some people might not be willing to accommodate them as we'd like, but others will.

On the hand, if government is in charge deciding which biases we can and can't have, it's a different story. In that case, it IS majority rule - the will of the majority will be forced on everyone else. When the DeSantis jackboots take over it's entirely possible they'll add political affiliation to the protected classes list. And then, when the nazi youth come into your diner, fresh from their "kill the homos" rally, you'll have to knuckle under and serve them. Or go to jail.
 
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The problem is when I was a kid people in my little town would not sell minorities houses. I remember when I was about 9 (not really, hell I don't know how old I am right now, but I was really short) adults talking about blacks ruining property values. So, if a baker can not sell gay people a cake then realtors can refuse to sell black people houses, or gas stations would not pump black people gas when they drive through, or breakfast at the local diner. Do you see what you guys are saying? If you have the majority you can literally control people in your area.
This is the best argument so far, for the 'force them to do something they don't want' position.

I think the best counter-argument is this: as a default, we don't want the government to force people to do anything. The government's main role is to prevent people from forcing others to do things -- to allow us to get on with our lives. It should just provide a framework for free people to live their lives as they want. This is the pure libertarian position.

But like all 'pure' positions, it runs into problems in the real world. For example, a pure libertarian position would allow parents to raise their children to be illiterate and innumerate. So we force them to educate their children. And we even force the childless to help pay for this, on the grounds that an educated population is a 'public good'.

But we draw the line there. We don't force parents to make their children fit, by having them run five miles a day. We don't force them to forbid excessive television watching. In the worst cases of child neglect, we do intervene, but these have to be pretty extreme. Basically, if you feed your children, keep them reasonably clean and well-clothed .. you are left alone.

On employment, we have, for the last fifty years or so, taken an interventionist stand, extending one that was taken even earlier, when we forced employers to meet certain minimum standards of workplace safety, working hours, even wage levels.

The libertarian model assumes more or less equally powerful individuals bargaining in a free market. The reality of capitalism is that the employer has far more power than the worker -- thus, various state interventions to right the balance a bit.

With respect to the race question, there was another evil that could only be dealt with by extending state power: there was fairly systematic discrimination against hiring Blacks, especially in the American South.

This had a real, and negative, impact. In the South, even employers that might have hired Blacks -- as some employers in the North did, to undercut wages -- were afraid to do so.

[This was a big issue in the 1930s when the UAW was trying to organize the Ford plants because Henry Ford had always hired Black workers, and the white workers were racist ...how the union stopped Blacks from being strikebreakers and confronted the racism of its own members is an interesting story, too long to tell here, but a good summary (a review of two books on it) is here: Black Workers, Fordism and the UAW | Solidarity ]

So in the South, Blacks weren't hired even for many unskilled jobs for which they would have been hired in the North. This was not necessarily because the owners of the businesses in question were prejudiced. (I was part of a group, led by an eccentric Black, called the 'Progressive Youth Association' in Houston in the early sixties: among other things, we picketed the biggest downtown department store, Foley's, which didn't hire Blacks: DON'T SHOP WHERE YOU CAN'T WORK was our slogan. But fear of the prejudice of whites was strong among the owners, who weren't personally particularly prejudiced -- they feared losing white customers.)

So ... it required the law, one that interfered with the right of an employer to hire whom he chose. Then, the owners of businesses in the South could say to their white customers, "We're forced to do this."

In other words, a great evil -- locking Blacks out of good jobs -- required another evil -- expanding government power -- to counter it.

If gays were being denied some essential service, just because they were gay -- if, say, the only supermarket in town refused to sell food to gay customers -- we would have a case for extending the power of the government to force them to do so.

But this is a trivial, concocted situation. The baker in question has a strong religious prohibition against recognizing same-sex marriages. He'll sell them a cake, but he won't violate his conscience by making one honoring same-sex marriage. The gay customers can easily go elsewhere. No one has suggested that they can't get a cake from another baker.
This is purely a small-minded persecution of a religious person that has a belief that his persecutors do not like. It is in no way comparable to preventing Black people from getting jobs.

The value of this case is that it shows the totalitarian mindset of a section of the Left.

And there is hypocrisy here too. If fundamentalist Christians can be forced to bake a cake celebrating a gay marriage, why can't they be forced to bake one for, say, Satanists -- why can't Muslim bakers be forced to bake a cake celebrating Israeli Independence Day? Why can't a Black baker be forced to bake a cake celebrating the local Ku Klux Klan?

The totalitarian mindset cannot stand genuine diversity. It does not want to live in a world where people can disagree on things, but still get along together. This mindset is the greatest enemy of the sort of commonsense, give-and-take, mind-your-own-business that allows a community of diverse beliefs and cultures to co-exist.
 
As soon as you concede that, you lose the argument. The rest is moot. Once you grant government the power to compel you to associate with others against your will, it's just a matter of who's on charge at the time.

When doing business, PA laws do dictate that you must serve everyone equally. In other words, you can’t claim religious freedom by simply saying “I don’t want to serve them because I don’t like them”. That’s not protected by religious freedom. But…if you say “I can’t bake a cake for the wedding because that would be the same as me participating in the wedding”, that’s different. You are not making a statement about your feelings about gay people, you are just saying that you can’t participate in those activities.
 
Doug, some years ago there was a talk radio duo in Los Angeles doing the Ken and Bob Show.
When the Leftist mouthed off about how smart the Left is, I called and offered to pay for IQ tests for both of us.
If he won, I would pay him $10,000 but if he lost, he would pay me $10,000.
Ken Minyard and Bob Arthur. Can't recall which was Lefty but he passed on the wager.
I did the same thing to Fat Boy on a television show and he wouldn't take the test either.
It is fun to have fun but you have to know how. - The Cat in the Hat
Yes. It's satisfying to skewer hypocrites, and to blow up lazy assumptions. On another thread, one of them made some insult about how stupid we Rightists were ... so I asked him for help in solving a very difficult integral. He went silent. Maybe he's working on the problem.

But not all people on the Left are like that, and we've got a few on the Right who are also like that. Both of them pollute political argument, by turning it into a personal slanging match. The whole point of a forum like this is that we ought to be able to confront the best arguments of the other side ... which will sharpen our thinking, and, who knows, might even change our minds on something. Only a fool believes he is always 100% right on every question, and I have appreciated being able to argue with intelligent Leftists here.

(By the way, I've just started reading your book, but so far I've only got into the part where you reprise Paley's watchmaker argument. I'm going to bed now and will get through another chapter or two.)
 
When doing business, PA laws do dictate that you must serve everyone equally.
Libs say this all the time, but it isn't true. PA laws do NOT dictate that businesses must serve everyone equally. They just ban certain biases as outlined by the "protected classes". Everything else is fair game.

In other words, you can’t claim religious freedom by simply saying “I don’t want to serve them because I don’t like them”. That’s not protected by religious freedom. But…if you say “I can’t bake a cake for the wedding because that would be the same as me participating in the wedding”, that’s different.

I reject this conception of the First Amendment. It's not supposed to be "special rights for special people". It doesn't grant religious people freedoms the rest of us don't get. That may be the way the Court currently interprets it, but it's bullshit.
 
No, they really aren't.

Bullshit. He's providing a cake. He's not doing marriage counselling. He's not performing the service.


No rights are being given up because they sued the business, not him personally.

Again, I'm a realist. Any fool who thinks he has rights needs to look up "Japanese Americans, 1942"

You have privileges that society agrees you should have.


Actually, until SCOTUS ruled otherwise, the laws against interracial marriages WERE justified on the basis of religion. in fact, the lower court judge ruled.

On October 28, 1964, after waiting almost a year for a response to their motion, the ACLU attorneys filed a federal class action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. This prompted the county court judge in the case, Leon M. Bazile (1890–1967), to issue a ruling on the long-pending motion to vacate. Echoing Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's 18th-century interpretation of race, Bazile denied the motion with the words:



So some mutant CAN claim that because my lady love was born in China and my ancestors came from Europe, God never meant for us to be.



Except that it would never happen, my boss would simply fire me and call me a bigot in court. Of course, there was a legitimate religious objection to Mormons by the Evangelicals...they are a cult. Or at least that's what they thought until Romney got the GOP nomination, because OH MY GOD, THERE'S A NEGRO IN THE WHITE HOUSE!!! Racial Bigotry always trumps religious bigotry with the Evangelicals, so fuck 'em.



Uh, the Bible says that you should stone people, doesn't say anything about Stoning them for baking a cake for the gay people. Of course, once we decided stoning people for minor infractions was unacceptable.. so was the rest of it.


Your free to worship any imaginary sky friend you want. But once you run a business you have to follow the law. It's really that simple. if he feels doing the things his business contracted to do is against his bronze age superstitions, he always has the option to do something else for a living that won't.


We’ll, you and I disagree…i still think the cotus is the first law of the land and the protections it affords cannot be negated by legislation. To me this means people have the freedom to exercise their religion….that means they can practice their religion, that doesn’t give them the excuse to discriminate, but it does give them the right to opt out of an activity if they feel doing that activity would be participating in a sin.

I know you don’t believe that…that’s fine, we have the right to disagree.
 
Libs say this all the time, but it isn't true. PA laws do NOT dictate that businesses must serve everyone equally. They just ban certain biases as outlined by the "protected classes". Everything else is fair game.



I reject this conception of the First Amendment. It's not supposed to be "special rights for special people". It doesn't grant religious people freedoms the rest of us don't get. That may be the way the Court currently interprets it, but it's bullshit.

Then you are in the same camp as joe, you have to choose between operating a business, or observing your religion. In your version of things, the religious person must always succumb to the whims of everyone else. In other words, you believe the right of people to be gay has more weight than the right of a person to exercise their freedom of religion.

So, as with joe, you believe that if a person wants to own a business, they have to compromise their personal beliefs and freedoms. Hmm…I can’t wait until the courts eventually rule against Phillips and then it’s going to be open season on everyone from every persuasion….and they won’t be able to refuse because the precedent has been set.

Maybe not right away, but eventually, this will come around to something that those like you will be disadvantaged from…but..again, the precedent will be set…
 
Meh. Just make an awful cake.
Oops, that salt looked just like sugar. Lol.

That doesn’t work, because then the baker gets sued because the gay couple will say the baker purposely ruined the cake because he was opposed to baking it.

They will say he purposely ruined their big day.
 
Then you are in the same camp as joe, you have to choose between operating a business, or observing your religion. In your version of things, the religious person must always succumb to the whims of everyone else. In other words, you believe the right of people to be gay has more weight than the right of a person to exercise their freedom of religion.

If you think that, you haven't been reading anything I've posted.
 
The problem is when I was a kid people in my little town would not sell minorities houses. I remember when I was about 9 (not really, hell I don't know how old I am right now, but I was really short) adults talking about blacks ruining property values. So, if a baker can not sell gay people a cake then realtors can refuse to sell black people houses, or gas stations would not pump black people gas when they drive through, or breakfast at the local diner. Do you see what you guys are saying? If you have the majority you can literally control people in your area.

It’s a little bit different dude.

One, a house is a life necessity

Two, being black is immutable. Being gay is not.
 
That doesn’t work, because then the baker gets sued because the gay couple will say the baker purposely ruined the cake because he was opposed to baking it.

They will say he purposely ruined their big day.

You could just drop it on the way to the counter?
 
That doesn’t work, because then the baker gets sued because the gay couple will say the baker purposely ruined the cake because he was opposed to baking it.

They will say he purposely ruined their big day.
That would be impossible to prove. If their big day was really that important, find a gay baker.
 
We’ll, you and I disagree…i still think the cotus is the first law of the land and the protections it affords cannot be negated by legislation. To me this means people have the freedom to exercise their religion….that means they can practice their religion, that doesn’t give them the excuse to discriminate, but it does give them the right to opt out of an activity if they feel doing that activity would be participating in a sin.

I know you don’t believe that…that’s fine, we have the right to disagree.
Well, let's see where we disagree.

I believe that the main role of government should be to provide a framework for free men and women to go about their business. It should not be the government's role to tell them what to think or how to act, except where those acts would harm others.

And the reason is, "the government" is not some abstract, neutral, secular-god entity ... it's also made up of men and women, who have personal material interests. They're not philosopher-kings. A democratic government will, hopefully, more or less see all all the competing material interests cancel each other out, although in reality we know that lobbying and campaign contributions and control of the media give some groups far more power to influence the government than others.

The thing about government, unlike private entities, is that there is no escaping it. If you don't like what my conservative organization is urging you to do -- say, to fly the flag in fron t of your house and join with your neighbors every morning for a Pledge of Allegiance ceremony -- , you can ignore us. But if we can capture the government, we can pass a law forcing you to do it.

Should a progressive publisher be forced by the government to print a book from a manuscript submitted by a horrible old rightwinger like me, full of racist-fascist-sexist-ageist-ableist-homo/trans/MAP-phobic garbage? (As the progressive publisher would see it.)

Well, yes ... if there were only one publisher in the country -- if there were a 'natural monopoly' of printing presses and this publisher had the only one -- there would be a case for forcing them to be politically neutral. But since I can go elsewhere, there isn't.

When there is a demonstrable great evil, the solving of which requires the lesser evil of yet more government expansion of its power, then we have to consider doing that. But if not, we shouldn't.

Surely reasonable people can agree on that?
 

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